[Music]
G: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s
enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen
McCulloch.
L: I’m Lauren Gawne. And today, we’re
getting enthusiastic about indicating how
we know things, which is “evidentiality.”
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[Music]
G: So, if I say something like, “Oh, my
god! Harry got a new broomstick!”
L: This is obviously the world in which we
are both associate professors at Hogwarts
School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
G: They’ve introduced a linguistics course,
what can I say? They brought us in to teach
it.
L: I’m so excited. That is definitely news.
Harry has a new broomstick. Did you see the
new broomstick? Is that how you know? Is why
that why you’re telling…
G: Definitely one thing I could say would
be, “Yes! Yes, I saw it! It’s great. It’s
a Nimbus 2000.” But another thing I can
also say was, “No. But I heard him flying
on it, and it sounds fancier than his old
one.”
L: Right. In that case, you haven’t seen
it, but you’ve heard it. So, you know that
there’s a new one.
G: Yeah. I know it’s a new one. Broomsticks
have a distinctive sound – who knew? They
definitely do. Or I could say, “No. But
Hermione told me.”
L: Obviously.
G: Because she knows everything.
L: Because she knows everything – yeah.
G: Or I might say, “No. I didn’t see it,
but I saw the packaging for it.” I knew
that he’d gotten it. Or I could say, “No.
I didn’t see it, but he left his old one
in his room while he was at Quidditch practice,
so I inferred that he must’ve gotten a new
one.”
L: Right. And in this case, your evidence
is not as direct. You haven’t got absolute
proof. He may have just decided his was broken
and he was gonna borrow a spare one.
G: Right. Or maybe he got sick or something.
Something could have definitely come up. Or
I could be even less certain and say, “No.
But I read it in the tea leaves,” or, “I
saw it in a dream.”
L: You must be very good at divination.
G: What can I say? It’s one of my many talents.
Or I might say, “No. I didn’t see it,
but Harry gets a new broom every year – or
every book – and so I’ve inferred that
he must be getting a new one as well this
year.”
L: Right – based on kind of inferred evidence
of habitual reality.
G: Yeah. Normally, he gets a new broomstick.
Harry got a new broomstick again.
L: All of these are different sources of evidence.
You have different evidence to show that you
believe this claim to be true. But you don’t
necessarily say that overtly. When people
gossip, they do that all the time. All the
time someone will be like “Omg! This thing
happened.” And you’ll be like “Oh, my
god! Did you see that happen?” And then
they’ll be like “Uh, no. I just heard
about it.”
G: Yeah. “Did you know that this person’s
been stealing all of the cookies from the
cookie jar?” Like “Wait, no, did you see
them?” “No, but they had crumbs on their
shirt.” “Oh! Maybe that was this person.”
L: Guilty.
G: Guilty as charged. I saw them sneaking
out of the room with a suspicious look on
their face. I like this Harry Potter example
because it sets up a world where we can have
this kind of gossip and we can make these
kinds of inferences. But we do this all the
time.
L: And when we do give more evidence, when
we explain how we know it, like in all of
those examples, in English we just have to
add an extra phrase or some extra words. But
this isn’t the case for all languages. There
are some languages where it’s actually part
of the grammatical system. You have to choose
a grammatical form that explains how you know
the information in the sentence that you’re
saying.
G: In the same way that, in English, we need
to choose a time when something happened anytime
you say something. I can’t just say, “Harry
get a new broomstick,” to mean, “He got
one,” or “He will get one,” or “He
has one now,” “He is getting one currently.”
I have to pick between which of those kinds
of getting he wants to. But in some languages,
while you can specify the time by using words
like “yesterday” or “tomorrow” or
“recently” or “a long time ago,” you
don’t have to. In English, you have to specific
when something happened.
L: It would be a bit like if we got a new
suffix on a verb like “got.” So, it’s
something like “Harry got-saw a new broomstick”
or “Harry got-heard a new broomstick.”
And you have to use that.
G: That could mean, “I saw that he got it”
or “I heard that he got it.”
L: Yeah. It’s not a particularly attractive
– I feel like we could definitely find a
nicer way of putting that into our grammar
if we wanted to, but that’s a very crude
example.
G: I feel like I’d like to make some sort
of shortened version of “apparently” because
I think I use “apparently” a lot for like
“I’m not really confident about the source
of this evidence.”
L: “Harry got-apps.”
G: Yeah. Like “per” – “Harry per-got
a new broomstick,” which could short for
“apparently” or something.
L: I like that you’re putting it as a prefix
instead of a suffix.
G: I don’t think we have enough prefixes,
grammatically, in English. I want some more
prefixes.
L: No, you’re right.
G: I don’t think that’s how grammar works,
but it’s okay.
L: So, it can be a prefix. It can be a suffix.
It could be a completely different form of
the verb. In some languages, they’re particles.
But they’re part of the grammar instead
of being a word that you choose. This happens
across – the most inflated claim I’ve
heard is that 25% of the world’s languages
have some form of grammatical evidentiality.
G: Wow!
L: A lot of those languages are very small
language families and groups spoken in the
Amazon, and in the Tibetan area, across Papua
New Guinea, and the Balkans – are kind of
the four big areas people talk about. But
you also find quite a few languages from North
America. Very occasional languages in, say,
Australia also have at least one grammatical
evidential.
G: Yeah. I don’t think I speak any languages
that have evidential markers. But the European
languages don’t have to have them and those
are most of the language’s that I speak.
L: No. They’re missing out, those European
languages.
G: You’ve done some research on evidentials,
right?
L: That is correct. My PhD thesis was all
about evidentials in a Tibetan language spoken
in Nepal called Yolmo. I was interested in
understanding what different types of options
they had for evidentiality but also how people
choose to use them strategically in conversations
– so how people use them in that kind of
gossipy context. Tibetan languages are interesting
because, as well as all those categories we
talked about in terms of the evidence for
Harry’s new broomstick, there’s also an
evidential form that Harry could use if he
got a new broomstick.
G: “I got a new broomstick myself (I know
it because it happened to me)?”
L: Yeah. He wouldn’t have to use something
like “I saw myself get a new broomstick.”
That would be quite unusual.
G: It would be kind of weird – yeah.
L: And in fact, he can use it. But if he used
the form that’s the equivalent of “I saw
it,” it would be kind of like an English
form of “Oh, I see I have a new broomstick!”
It’s new information. It’s a bit unexpected.
G: Could you do that in something like “Harry
got me a new broomstick”? And so I’m directly
involved in this – I can see that he got
it for me?
L: Yeah. Because it’s an event you participated
in. In some Tibetan languages it’s really
specific who you’re allowed to talk about
using this form. It’s a bit more flexible
in Yolmo. But it means that people have these
options between something that they perceive
either by sight or taste or smell or something
that they know from their personal experience.
There’s also a form that you can use if
you’re less certain, which is less about
evidence and more about just how certain you
are. And one of my favourites, which is not
used that often, but it’s one that’s like
“information that is so obvious everybody
knows it.”
G: Like “It’s daytime” or something?
L: “Harry Potter is a wizard.”
G: Right. Okay. Everyone knows this. They
don’t have to say, “J.K. Rowling told
me that Harry Potter is a wizard.”
L: Yeah. A lot of the examples that I got
from people are things like “sugar is sweet,”
“lemons are sour.”
G: Right.
L: Just, like, “This is such obvious, general
facts about the world.”
G: Or, “This is the town we live in.”
L: Yeah.
G: Everyone knows we’re in this town.
L: But even then, that’s not a kind of – I
don’t wanna say the “universal” because
that’s a dangerous word – but…
G: It’s not self-evident?
L: It’s not as self-evident as something
like “Tea is tasty,” which is taken as
a generally given fact. They also have a little
particle that you can use to say that something
is reported from somewhere else. And that’s
just “ló.” When it comes to telling stories,
when you’ve heard stuff from people, it
would just be so efficient if you could just
have a little “ló” at the end when you’re
telling gossip.
G: Yeah. Because then you know this is still
the story and you know that you’re not taking
credit for knowing it yourself directly.
L: Yeah. You’re just passing on the gossip.
So, those are the forms that I was looking
at. I was looking at how people used them
in things like reporting stories from other
people but also in how you ask questions.
G: How do you use evidentials to ask questions?
L: It varies across different languages. Sometimes,
you just use a base form or a neutral form
or a question form. But in Tibetan languages,
you use the form of the evidential that you
think someone is gonna answer with. So, if
I was gonna ask you, “Did Harry get a new
broom?” if you went to Quidditch practice
a lot, I might ask you using the one for “Did
you see this directly?” “Did you see Harry
got a new broom?”
G: Right. Whereas, otherwise you might say,
“Did you hear whether Harry got a new broom?”
or “Did you hear that Harry got a new broom?”
“Do you think that…?” “Can you infer
that…?”
L: Yeah. Or it’s that time of year where
Harry always breaks his broom and someone
buys him a new one, I might use the “Did
Harry get a new broom as per the standard
pattern of behaviour?”
G: Right. I mean, you can kind of do this
if you really want to in English. You can
say, “Do you suppose Harry got a new broom
again?” or “Do you reckon Harry got a
new broom?” But it’s not obligatory – yeah.
L: Yeah. The important thing about evidentials
is not that it’s impossible to do this in
English, it’s just because it’s baked
into the grammar –
G: Right. You have to do it.
L: – it crops up all the time. The cool
thing is, because you have to use the evidential
that you think someone’s gonna use in their
answer, you basically have to do this kind
of context-reading prediction of what evidence
you think they’re gonna have, or what would
be the best evidence to have for asking a
particular question and getting particular
information.
G: You end up taking on their perspective
of “What do I assume that this person likely
knows?” or “How do I assume that this
person gets their information?”
L: Yeah. And the person doesn’t have to
answer – if they don’t have that level
of evidence, they’ll reply with something
else. But it’s a nifty interactional trick
if you think about it.
G: Do you have to use the one that’s the
most certain of the pieces of evidence that
you think they have?
L: No, you use the one that you think is the
best fit.
G: The most likely – okay.
L: Yeah. Certainty is complex because for
a lot of things you might think that having
direct – that direct “I saw” evidence
is the best. But there are some situations
where it would be rude to presume that I have
that direct evidence. So, for example, if
someone asked me if you were hungry – they
said, “Is Gretchen hungry?” – it would
actually be rude for them to ask if I had
direct evidence because the only direct evidence
you have is your personal feeling of hunger.
They would ask me using the reported-speech
form or the less-direct form.
G: Like “Did Gretchen tell you she was hungry?”
or “Do you infer Gretchen is probably hungry
because you know it’s been five hours since
she ate?”
L: We have this idea that more direct evidence
is good. It was interesting when we were building
that list of examples, you were ordering them
instinctively in a way that you saw as more-evidence,
and more certain, and more direct from “I
saw it” to –
G: Yeah. Whereas, you’re the one that’s
done the evidential literature, and I was
like “I just feel like these should go in
an order.”
L: That order pretty much matches up with
what a lot of the literature says in terms
of a hierarchy of evidence being better or
higher-quality or something. But if you actually
look at the interactional choices people make
when they’re chatting, sometimes it’s
better that you don’t use something that’s
more certain or more direct because it’s
rude or presumptive.
G: Yeah. Can you use this type of thing to
be polite as well? If I say, “I wonder if
you could possibly open the window?” it’s
not that I’m actually wondering about your
ability to open the window, it’s more that
I’m trying to make an indirect request.
Can you use evidentials like that?
L: There’s definitely times where it’s
more appropriate to ask questions or to state
things using more-direct evidence and there
are times where it’s better to state things
using less-direct evidence. And in that case,
politeness does come into it.
G: This seems like the kind of question that
people probably ask is “Well, if you have
evidentials, does that mean that people can’t
lie?” But surely people could use an evidential
they don’t actually have evidence for if
they wanna lie, right?
L: Yeah. I guess, you could potentially try
and send people off track by using an inferred
evidential when you actually witness something
or vice versa. People can definitely use them.
Just because they mark the source of evidence
doesn’t mean you have to always use the
one that you definitely have evidence for.
G: If I say that I saw you stealing the cookies
from me, that doesn’t actually mean that
I actually saw it, it just means that I’m
saying that I saw it.
L: Yeah. Or there’s an anecdote in my thesis
where I talk about going to a wedding with
a bunch of people when I was doing field work.
As they were going around servicing – at
a wedding you traditionally – like any wedding
across the world, it’s the do you want the
chicken or the fish? You feed people a lot
of meat. And you feed them a lot of booze.
And it’s a big party. And one of the women,
who was being very silly and joking around,
and whenever they came around would say, “She
eats meat,” and would use the reported form
to suggest that I had said that I eat meat.
They’re like, “Oh, yeah. She eats meat.
Oh, yeah, she drinks heaps,” which as a
teetotaling vegetarian – they know I’m
a teetotaling vegetarian because they find
it very funny So, putting these words in my
mouth was a big, hilarious joke for them.
But they didn’t honestly believe that I’d
said that.
G: Right, right, right. They were using that
to make fun of you, as you do.
L: Yeah. The other really nifty example I
have is there was a time where I agreed to
something by nodding my head, which everyone
understood. And then later someone was like
“Oh, she said ‘Yes’” – reported
speech.
G: Right. Whereas, the literal word you said
wasn’t “Yes,” but…
L: It’s not a verbatim, court of law, “This
is exactly that you said.” It’s a general
intent reporting.
G: Are there cognitive effects of having evidentials?
Do people remember source of information better
or something?
L: I still personally haven’t seen a study
that really convinces me of that. But there’s
some really cute studies in children and how
children acquire evidentiality. They’ve
done this in Turkish and Tibetan, and the
general indication is children can start using
them relatively young, from like 3 or 4 years
of age, but often when they’re really young,
they haven’t entirely figured out what the
evidentials are doing in terms of what they’re
marking. They tend to use them to indicate
that they’re more or less certain. Certainty
is definitely tied up in things. If you saw
Harry had a new broomstick, you would feel
more certain about it than if there was some
rubbish outside.
G: The packaging or whatever.
L: The kind of – in the corridor. Because
that packaging could technically belong to
someone else even if no one else really rides
broomsticks in that dormitory. But then, just
because you have that direct evidence, it
could still be wrong. Harry could be borrowing
someone else’s new broomstick. The literature
on evidentiality often mentions that certainty
is an inferred part of using particular evidentials,
but it doesn’t have to be. Children tend
to latch onto this certainty idea when they
first start using them and then they kind
of refine what they’re doing with them.
G: That’s so cute. It reminds me of how
children acquire numbers and time durations
and stuff.
L: Ah, yeah. We talked about that in our time
episode.
G: Yeah. We talked about that children know
that an hour is longer than a minute, but
they don’t know that one hour is longer
than two minutes because maybe that’s more.
L: Two is a bigger number than one.
G: Exactly. Or three minutes might be longer
than two hours because – oh, god. I dunno!
They have some sense of the magnitudes, but
they don’t have exact computations to get
them.
L: Because children see their parents and
other adult users of the languages using these
evidentials in situations that seem more certain
because it’s right there. That’s how they
start using them.
G: And children are often missing out on the
type of social information that we’ve acquired
to be like “Well, actually I can infer this
because I have this social information about
what the package looks like that this comes
in,” or “I know who knows who’s talked
to who,” or something like that. Children
are often missing this social information
sometimes.
L: That’s a lot to keep in your head even
as an adult.
G: How does a language start getting evidentials?
Where do they tend to come from? Are they
other words that get shortened, or are they
words that formally meant something to do
with time or something else, or where does
evidentiality come from in a language?
L: One of the really great things about studying
evidentiality in the Tibetan languages is
that Tibetan has a pretty comparable literary
history to English. It’s also unsurprising,
then, that it has a similarly monstrous relationship
between letters and sounds as English does.
G: The older the writing system, the less
logical it is. It’s just true.
L: So many silent letters. And so that’s
really handy because we can see in old, written
Tibetan from 800, 900 years ago that there
weren’t these evidential forms. There were
some older forms that have acquired evidential
meaning. In other languages where we have
the ability to trace it because of a literary
history or because related languages have
a similar form without evidentials meaning,
one of the very common things that happens
is a word that means something like “see”
or “perceive” becomes – and especially
for the reporting of speech evidence, a word
that meant “say” or “talk” – becomes
the grammatical form.
G: Right. Okay. That makes sense.
L: For example, the Yolmo form is “ló”
– that is from an older form that meant
“to say.” And then a new verb that means
“to say” has come into the language.
G: Kind of like how we might talk about hearsay
evidence, which literally comes from the words
“hear” and “say” and becomes an adjective
instead.
L: Yeah. That’s a really great example.
A lot of the time it is taking from other
words. And then sometimes, for example, the
form that means that you know something from
your own personal experience in Tibetan languages
– the personal, the ego evidential – was
a neutral, just general, good-old copula,
but because these other forms came in, it
created this paradigm that one got pushed
there and that meaning was created for it.
G: Because it was like “Well, this used
to be the normal way of saying something,
but then if you don’t say ‘hear’ or
‘tell’ or ‘see,’ then the neutral
one becomes the really strong form’”?
L: It takes on that, yeah, very specific meaning.
G: There’s regions that tend to have evidentials
in the Amazon, and Tibetan languages, Papua
New Guinea, and the Balkans, are these because
there’s a bunch of related languages in
these areas that have evidential markers or
do they spread from one language to another
even if they aren’t necessarily related
historically?
L: There’s a few things that happen. One
thing is that evidentiality does seem to be
one of those things that goes across language
families pretty well. If your neighbours are
speaking an unrelated language but you speak
it because you live in a multilingual society,
which as we know is the norm across the world,
you might be like, “Ah, that’s a really
handy thing. I’m gonna borrow that into
our language.” There are some really nice
examples of borrowing across languages. Sometimes,
it’s a form. We know that by Middle Tibetan
a lot of these evidentials were starting to
come into place and so a lot of the modern
Tibetan languages spoken across Tibet, and
India, and Nepal kind of have evidentiality
because of this historic relationship.
G: And they borrow the specific words – or
they borrow the idea of it but use their words
– or some combination thereof?
L; Yeah. Some of them it’s an evolution
from an older language that had evidentiality.
For some of them it’s contact that relates
to it. But also we know that languages can
develop evidentiality relatively quickly.
It’s something once you kind of start with
that category – so we’ve seen families
where it evolves multiple times in different
languages in the area. One reason that’s
given for this as a hypothetical is that evidentiality
tends to arise in small communities where
people care about keeping track of information
and knowledge and ownership of knowledge.
G: Right. I guess that makes sense, especially
if you’re asking someone, “Have you seen
this?” or “Have you heard this?” you
don’t know what to expect from that person,
which requires a lot of prior context. Whereas,
if you interact with a lot of strangers, you
don’t necessarily have that context for
everybody.
L: Yeah. And you’re very concerned about
not intruding on someone’s knowledge or
marking out very clearly how you know things,
so you don’t make assumptions about people’s
knowledge and what they know and what they
don’t know. Some people have hypothesised
that’s why it occurs a lot in smaller languages
– even though it’s 25% of the world’s
languages that have evidentials, it tends
to not be those bigger languages because by
the time you get to being a larger language
where lots of people who are strangers are
interacting, they don’t care as much about
knowledge state and ownership of knowledge.
G: So, if you’re English or Mandarin or
Arabic or something, you’re like, “Well,
there’s lots of people who speak these.
They’re spoken in big metropolises. You
can’t have every shopkeeper know what everyone’s
interior state is when they’re coming in
to buy bread,” or something?
L: Yeah. I think it can kind of explain why
it happens in smaller languages, but I also
feel like it’s shortchanging the potential
of large languages. Tibetan is not a small
language. It’s spoken by millions of people.
It has a long, written tradition. So, I think
it’s not the whole picture.
G: And because they seem to spread from language
to language, that also suggests that maybe
they’re easier to adopt. My favourite theory
of evidentiality – which I don’t know
if I actually believe this, but I’d like
to believe it a lot – is that we’re developing
a system of evidentiality using acronyms on
the internet.
L: Oh, okay! Share your theory with me.
G: I’m not committed to this theory, but
I like the idea of it. And maybe someday it’ll
be true. I think the example that I’m gonna
use – because it’s a theory that I talked
about on Tumblr five years ago and I still
think it has some potential. The Tumblr-appropriate
example that I had was “They’d make a
terrible couple” because people talk about
shipping a lot on Tumblr. I think you can
say this with varying degrees of certainty
or belief or emotion or knowledge or something.
I don’t know if they quite qualify as evidentials
because none of them mean, “I heard that…”
or “I saw that…” but you can say something
like “Tbh, they’d make a terrible couple”
or “Imo, they’d make a terrible couple”
or “Iirc, they’d make a terrible couple”
or “Omg, they’d make a terrible couple.”
This at least adds something – “To be
honest” or “In my opinion” or “If
I recall correctly” or “Oh my god.”
This at least adds some sort of flavor to
this. Again, this is very hypothetical theory
and I’m not sure if it’s a real…
L: Well, they’re definitely adding epistemics,
so that’s more about the certainty stuff
we were talking about. But certainty could
be a gateway to evidence if we continue to
use them.
G: Okay. So, we’re like the toddler version
of evidentials where we’re putting certainty
on?
L: Potentially. This is potentially a gateway
to evidence.
G: I like this.
L: We just need to create a bunch of acronyms
that are like “Isy” – “I saw yesterday.”
G: “Iht” – “I hear that.”
L: Yeah. That’s a good one.
G: I don’t know if these are gonna catch
on – “Ist” – “I see that.”
L: “Itt” – “I think that.”
G: “Iit” – “I infer that”?
L: Oh, yeah.
G: I mean, there’s “Til,” “Today I
learned,” but that doesn’t commit to the
source of the information.
L: No.
G: Hmm. Okay. We’ve got some ways to go
before internet acronyms become evidentials.
L: I feel like we have a potential grammatical
spot ripe for potential evidential development.
I personally think we have another rich source
of evidentials on the internet, which is something
we all take for granted as a basic piece of
architecture on the internet, but a hyperlink
is, really, a lot of the time used to provide
evidence for something you say – especially
in journalistic use of hyperlinks.
G: Oh! I think I like this.
L: If you say something like, “These two
celebrities were seen out yesterday, but they’d
make a terrible couple,” and it might link
to something that’s an article that says
why they’d make a terrible couple. That’s
your evidence right there.
G: Or you can do the extra-strong version
of that, which is “They’d make a terrible
couple” but each of those words is linked
separately to a different article.
L: More evidence is stronger.
G: That’s like, I have four pieces of evidence
– five pieces of evidence – one per word.
Or “This company has been involved in many
scandals,” and each of those words is separately
linked to a scandal. And you just see that,
and you don’t have to click on those, and
you’re like “I know there have been a
lot of scandals.”
L: Or even if it’s just linked once, you
feel more comfortable. I never click on hyperlinks
in news stories, but I feel more assured that
the journalist has evidence for things.
G: Yeah. I think I sometimes do this, especially
if I’m making some sort of statement, maybe,
that’s not as much of an opinion. But if
I’m saying something like “Evidentials
are a type of grammatical marker blah blah
blah,” and I link the word “evidentials”
to the Wikipedia article on evidentials, I’m
like “Okay. I’ve done my due diligence.
If someone wants to find out more information,
they can.” You don’t just have to believe
me. You can go look it up on Wikipedia.
L: Yeah. It’s not the same because it does
actually provide all that context. An evidential
form just kind of lets people know what the
status of the evidence is. But I think it’s
interesting how we relate to them as online
content.
G: That’s very interesting. You could argue
that the academic citation is maybe another
kind of evidential in that case because if
I wanna say, “Evidentials are found in 25%
of the world’s languages. Gawne (2015) says
this” – I don’t know if you say it.
L: Actually, you would cite “Aikhenvald
2004” but… Yes, you’re correct.
G: Okay. So, “(Aikhenvald 2004) Evidentials
are found in 25% of the world’s languages,”
and then even if I don’t actually go read
Aikhenvald 2004, I know that this has been
asserted in conjunction with that person.
L: Yeah. It’s the “I have read that”
evidential.
G: Yeah. Yeah. The other thing is, once you
know about evidentials, I feel like you start
noticing them everywhere.
L: I definitely notice in English gossip.
I’m always like “But how do you know that?”
I’m always looking for them. Or I always
notice when people do explicitly mark them.
G: Yeah. Once I started learning about them,
I noticed myself saying “apparently” a
lot because I wasn’t going to commit to
the source of that. I noticed evidentials
recently – or the English non-grammaticalised
type of evidentials – in this book called
The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie.
L: Which is a great book. I read it on your
recommendation and enjoyed it so much.
G: Excellent! The conceit of this book – this
book is narrated by a tower, which is also
a god. Anyway, it’s fantasy. And the thing
about the magic system in this world is that
if the object gods in this world say something,
it has to be true because if it’s not true,
then they will be automatically required to
use their power to make it true.
L: This is definitely a world where you don’t
wanna lie with an evidential.
G: Yeah. And if that’s not possible, then
the god dies.
L: Awks.
G: Yeah. It’s not a world where you have
this strict “You can’t lie,” it’s
like “You can lie, but you’re in trouble
if you do.” The human characters can lie,
but the magical characters use speaking to
create their magic. If you wanna make something
true, you can just speak it true, which is
kind of cool. But you also have to be very
careful when you’re telling stories or something
to qualify how you know something.
L: Because you don’t wanna accidentally
have not enough evidence and make something
true.
G: Exactly. You don’t wanna accidentally
say something that’s too ambitious, you
know? So, this character spends a lot of time
– the tower narrating the story, sometimes
the tower will say, “This is a story I have
been told. Here’s this blah blah blah story
story.” With that frame, then they don’t
have to do that much hedging.
L: You know what? This is world that would
be ripe for evidentials.
G: Exactly. It would be so much more economic
because then they wouldn’t have to do all
of this hedging in longer form, they could
just add it onto the verb and there you go.
Sometimes, they ask things in terms of questions
rather than saying, “You found this strange?”
– because they address specific other characters
– “You found this strange?” or “You
must’ve found this strange?”
L: That’s making a lot of presumptions.
G: Because they don’t know whether the other
character found it strange – yeah. Instead,
they can ask it as a question, “Was it strange
for you to hear this?” In the mind of reader,
it’s like, “Okay. Well, it was probably
strange.” But in terms of what the character’s
actually asserting it shows up as, “Okay.
You’re not asserting it because now it’s
a question.”
L: I would love to see this book translated
into Tibetan.
G: Great! How do we make that happen? If you
too would like to imagine what The Raven Tower
might be like if the evidentials were more
explicitly spelled out, I also did a live
Tweet with some snippets from the book. You
can follow along with that. We’ll link to
that.
[Music]
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