I want to start today with a little visualization
exercise. If you can, picture the coat of arms
of South Africa. It's this really stunning piece
of art. You've got the secretary bird, the rising
sun, elephant tusks. It's really majestic. But
I want you to look right at the bottom. There's
this green ribbon with a motto on it. Exactly.
And when you look at that, your first instinct
is probably to try and place it. Is it Zulu?
Is it Xhosa? Maybe Afrikanans. But it doesn't
look like any of them. It's a phrase. And it
translates to something like diverse people unite.
A really beautiful idea for a country. But the
language it's written in, that's where you find
the ghost in the machine. It really is. That
language is ZAM. Yeah. And the tragedy of it,
or maybe the irony, I'm sure which, is that ZAM
is extinct. There are no living native speakers.
Yeah. So the national motto of this vibrant modern
country is written in a language that's fallen
completely silent. Yeah, that fact just completely
floored me when I was digging into the sources.
It feels like a secret just hiding in plain sight.
But here's the thing. Zam wasn't some, you know,
isolated oddity. It belonged to a whole language
family that is, well, it's arguably one of the
most complex and tragic on Earth. Without a doubt.
It's a family that just challenges everything
we think we know, but what the human voice can
even do. So today we're doing a deep dive into
the two languages. And I have to say, going through
the research for this, my thinking went from,
okay, another language family to, wait a minute,
these might be the most complex sounds humans
have ever made. We're talking about world record
holders for phonetic complexity that are just
hanging on by the thinnest possible thread. It's
a study in extremes, really. On one side, you
have this. This maximum possible complexity,
just an explosion of sound. And on the other,
you have extreme demographic fragility. It's
like finding a supercomputer inside an ancient
ruin that's about to crumble. Right. So our mission
today is to try and unpack that. We're going
to look at the unique superpowers of the two
family, the detective work connecting them to
the ancient Kalahari. And, yeah, we have to face
the hard reality of where they stand today. And
to do that right, we first have to clear the
deck a little. We have to unlearn something that
most of us probably saw in old encyclopedias.
We need to talk about the K word of African linguistics.
You're talking about Khoisan. I am. Yeah. For
a very long time, you'd open a textbook and see
all these clique languages from southern Africa
just lumped together under this one big umbrella.
Khoisan. It's the standard label, I think. Most
people probably assume it's a real family, like
saying Romance languages or Indo -European. Right,
but that's the trap. Linguists today see Khoisan
as, well, it's... pretty much obsolete as a scientific
term it's a term of convenience not a genetic
reality it's a bit like looking at europe and
saying well basque and hungarian and english
must all be related because they're neighbors
which we know isn't true at all they might borrow
words sure but they have completely different
family trees exactly So the two languages, which
is our focus, they are a primary family. They
stand on their own. They're not some sub -branch
of a big Khoisan tree. They're their own distinct
lineage, spoken historically in Botswana, Namibia,
and South Africa. So if Khoisan is out, let's
get the name right. Tu, T -U -U, where does that
come from? It's actually a wonderful example
of linguistics finally getting it right. The
name Tu is from a word that shows up in both
main branches of the family. It just means person.
Oh, I really like that. It grounds the whole
discussion. Instead of some, you know, colonial
label or a complicated geographical name, we're
just using the word they use for themselves.
We are people. Precisely. Now, to kind of visualize
this, think about the arid parts of southern
Africa, the Kalahari Basin. This family is split
into two main branches. First, you have the Ta
branch. This is mostly in Botswana. It's the
more robust branch, relatively speaking. And
we'll get to what robust actually means in a
bit. Okay. And the second branch. The second
is the Kewi branch. Sometimes you'll see it written
as Joui. This was the branch found all across
South Africa. This is the one that includes Zam
from the motto. And this branch is, well, linguists
describe it as Moribund. Moribund. That's a very
polite academic way of saying dying. It is. And
the relationship between Ta and Kewi, it's distant.
They are related, but it's not like looking at
Spanish and Portuguese. It's a much, much deeper
separation. They've been apart for a very long
time. Okay, so we've got the geography, the Kalahari.
We've got the family tree, Ta and Kewi. But the
thing that really stopped me in my tracks was
the sound. We all hear about clicks. Maybe we've
seen them in movies. But the two languages take
this to a level that is, it's frankly hard for
an English speaker to even imagine. It really
is. We need to talk about their specific superpower.
Because two languages, along with just one neighboring
language called MAMCO, are the only languages
in the world to use bilabial clicks as speech
sounds. Bilabial. Let's just unpack that. That
just means two lips, right? Correct. Bilabial,
yes. So most clicks we might try to imitate are
made with the tongue against the teeth or the
roof of the mouth, like that stick sound. Exactly.
Those are tongue -based. But a bilabial click
is made just with the lips. It sounds almost
like a stiff kiss. A pop. A kiss sound, but used
as a consonant. So you're not just being affectionate.
You're using it in a word to mean, I don't know,
dog or run. Precisely. Now I should add a tiny
asterisk here just for the linguists listening.
There was a ritual language in Australia, Damon,
that also used them. But Damon was an invented
ceremonial language, not a mother tongue. In
terms of natural spoken languages, two stands
completely alone. That is just wild. Out of 7
,000 languages, only this group in the Kalahari
figured, hey, let's use a kiss sound to build
words. But it's not just that one sound, is it?
It's the sheer number of sounds. It's staggering.
Let's take the Ta language, also known as Okexo.
It's part of what we call a linguistic area,
Strogbund, that has the most complex inventory
of consonants in the world. When you say inventory,
give us a comparison. How many are we talking
about here? Well, English has about 24 consonant
sounds, give or take. Us, one. Somewhere between
80 and, you know, some analyses push it to 160.
Wait, 160? How is that even possible? I feel
like I'd run out of parts of my mouth. It's all
about the combinations. You have your basic consonants,
then you have clicks, but then you have clicks
that are voiced, clicks that are nasal, clicks
that are aspirated, clicks followed by a glottal
stop. And from what I read, they're also combining
different airstreams. Right, that's the key.
Most of our sounds are aggressive. We push air
out. Clicks are aggressive. We suck Aryan. Two
languages will do both, sometimes at the same
time. And then on top of all that, they have
these incredibly complex vowel systems and tone.
And tone, right. Just like Mandarin, the pitch
changes the meaning of the word. So you have
the world's widest variety of clicks, a massive
list of consonants, complex vowels, and tonal
changes all happening at once. It's like a symphony.
I mean, compared to that, we're basically playing
chopsticks on a toy piano, and they're playing
Rachmaninoff on a concert grand. That's a great
way to put it. It really represents the full
potential of what the human vocal tract can do.
It's a library of sounds that exists nowhere
else on earth. That brings us to the who. Who
are the people who developed this? I mean, we
don't have written records from 5 ,000 years
ago in the Kalahari. No, we don't. But we have
something almost as good. We have linguistic...
I love that term. It's like digging for history
inside the words themselves. Exactly. By comparing
the modern languages, we can reconstruct words
from Proto -2, the ancestor language. And there's
one specific word that acts like a GPS coordinate
for their history. It's the word for the gemsbok.
The antelope with the long, straight horns. A
very specific animal. A very specific animal.
The reconstructed word is something like dock
high. Now, why is that so important? because
to have a single common root word for the gemsbok,
the people who spoke that proto -language must
have lived where gemsbok lived. Which is the
desert, the arid scrubland, the Kalahari. Precisely.
It anchors them to that environment. It's proof
they didn't migrate there recently. They've been
desert dwellers for thousands and thousands of
years. But the sources also mentioned they weren't
alone out there. They were interacting with their
neighbors. Yes, specifically the Kho speaking
peoples. And this is where that Khoisan confusion
comes up again. Tu and Kho are distinct groups,
but they've lived side by side for millennia.
And they started to, well, swap things. Like
borrowing a cup of sugar, but for vocabulary.
And body parts, apparently. Yeah. The research
notes some really specific borrowings. For example,
the word for chest. In Naxo, it's goo. which
is borrowed from the co -word goo. And chin,
the language n has g -a -n, which is from co
-an -n. But here's my favorite little mystery
from the reading. It's the word for louse. Head
lice. Yep. The root word, something like Sony,
shows up in both to and co -families, but some
linguists think it doesn't actually belong to
either of them. So where did it come from? The
theory is that it might come from an even older
pre -to or pre -co substrate, a ghost language,
spoken by a group who was there even before them.
Wow, a ghost substrate. So we have a word for
a parasite that actually outlived the entire
language of the people who first named it. It
suggests these deep... deep layers of human history
in the Kalahari that we're just now beginning
to understand. This complexity, the borrowing,
and the shared sounds, it must make classification
a nightmare. You mentioned two isn't related
to the Kexa family, which includes the famous
Juhoan language. Right. It's the difference between
being related by blood and, say... related by
marriage. Tu and Tex are not genetic cousins,
but they form a sprockbund, a linguistic area.
They share clicks and tone because they've been
rubbing off on each other for so long. It must
be so hard for researchers, though. I was looking
at the list of names in the documents. Val Orange,
Kakea, Satya, Valpens. It's just a jumble. It
is a jumble. And that's partly because we just
got there too late. A lot of these names are
for varieties that went extinct before anyone
could properly document them. A researcher named
Westfall studied a variety called Namani. It's
gone. Dorothy Oblique recorded another one she
just called S5. Gone. It's like trying to map
a forest after a fire has already burned through
half of it. You're just counting the stumps and
trying to guess what the trees look like. That's
a painful but very accurate metaphor. And that
brings us to the hardest part of this. We need
to talk about the current status of the Kwee
branch. The South African branch, the one the
motto comes from. Yes. The Kwee languages were
once spoken all across South Africa. Today, that
entire branch is represented by essentially one
surviving language, Ng. And when we say surviving,
we need to be very clear about what that actually
means. We're not talking about a thriving village
of speakers. No. The source material is stark.
It notes that Ng has only one elderly speaker
left. One. Just one person holding an entire
branch of a language family in her mind. Effectively,
yes. I mean, there are community efforts. There
are heritage learners. But in terms of fluent
mother tongue competence, it's down to one. When
she passes, the language moves from living to
archival. That's just devastating. And it's not
just Enching. The list of the lost is so long.
Zam is gone. Zegri is gone. Zoroa .ungku. And
those aren't just names on a list. Each one was
a unique way of seeing the world. A unique sense
of humor. A unique way of classifying plants.
All of it just erased. It brings us right back
to that motto, K -E's are a key, diverse people
unite. It almost feels less like a slogan now
and more like a memorial. It serves as a permanent
reminder of what was lost. The Vol Orange group,
the Danster .UI, these are just file folders
filled with ghosts now. So is the news any better
for the other branch, the TA branch in Botswana?
You called it robust at the beginning. Well,
better is a very relative term here. The TA branch
is the survivor. But the primary language in
that branch is .exo. And what are the numbers
on that? About 2 ,500 speakers. Okay. 2 ,500.
I mean, globally speaking, that's a tiny village.
That's the population of a single large high
school. And that's the strongest language in
the entire family. That is the titan of the two
family, yes. And even within Ta, diversity is
collapsing. The lower Nassau dialects, Ani and
Hasi, they're already extinct. So Kai is holding
the line. pretty much by itself. That really
puts the word robust into perspective. It's robust
like a candle in a windstorm is robust compared
to a single match. Exactly. And this is why linguists
are so obsessive about documenting it. Because
while it's always the language that contains
that phonetic inventory we talked about, the
hundred plus consonants, the bilabial clicks.
So if not so goes, the bilabial click as a living
human sound, it essentially disappears from the
planet. It does. It becomes a recording. A digital
artifact, not a living, breathing mode of communication.
It would be like losing the color blue from our
visual spectrum. So let's try to synthesize this.
We have the two family. It's completely distinct.
It has this deep, deep history in the Kalahari,
proven by the word for Jemsbok. And it has by
far the most complex sound system humans have
ever produced. But demographically, it is on
the absolute brink. One branch is down to a single
person. The other is down to a few thousand.
It makes you think about what we value as advanced.
You know, we think of global languages like English
as being advanced because they have words for
Internet or microchip. But structurally. Structurally,
English is quite simple. Phonetically, we're
lazy. We're lazy. We are. We use a tiny fraction
of what our mouths and our lungs can actually
do. We settled for the easy sounds. The speakers
of two languages didn't settle. They used the
full instrument. They built a cathedral of sound
while most of us are building sheds. And that's
the thought I want to leave everyone with. We
often see history as this march of progress where
the better or more complex things win out. But
in this case, we have the Olympic athletes of
articulation, the most sophisticated sound systems
ever devised, being silenced by languages that
are, frankly, phonetic couch potatoes. It's a
sobering thought. When a language like N goes
silent, it's not like losing a book. It's like
burning down a library. but a library of sounds.
And you can't rebuild that library. You can't
just reinvent a bilabial click and all the grammar
that has to go with it. No. Once it's gone, it's
gone for good. On that note, thank you for guiding
us through this. It's a heavy topic, but a really
important one. My pleasure. And to all of you
listening, next time you see that South African
coat of arms, take a closer look at the motto.
Remember the people, the two, who gave us those
words. We'll see you on the next Deep Dive.