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Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language.
Today, we're going to talk about the psychology of pronouns, and then we'll talk about where the alphabet came from.
Working with several colleagues, psychologist James Pennebaker, author of The Secret Life of Pronouns, found that how we use pronouns and various other function words provides a surprisingly good assessment of people's psychological states.
For example, several studies showed that eye talk often co-occurs with depression.
In examining essays written by college students, Rude Gortner and Pennebaker found that depressed students used more eye words than non-depressed students.
And in a study looking at the poetry of poets who committed suicide compared to non-suicidal poets, Sturman and Pennebaker also found higher rates of I-words, which the researchers suggest shows that these poets were more intensely inward or self-focused.
But using more I words doesn't always mean you're depressed, especially when you're in social interactions that involve differences in relative status or increased social connectivity.
For example, commiserating with a friend will often bring out the we and you in all of us.
For example, why don't we go have dinner and you can tell me all about it?
But if you're talking to someone about something you need for a project, you'll likely shift to I. In other words, different contexts require different pronouns.
But a measurable shift in one's pronouns from we to I appears to signal something about a person's emotional state.
Looking at patterns of how people use pronouns in this way can help us understand how people deal with the effect of catastrophic or personally challenging events.
For example, by looking at how people used pronouns differently after the 9-11 attacks in both conversational data and internet chats and posts, researchers discovered that there was a notable decrease in the use of I pronouns and a corresponding increase in the use of we pronouns, mirroring the sense of belonging and shared emotional experience that the attack inspired.
In other words, people became more focused on being part of a larger community and on how this tragic experience connected them to others.
This sense of affiliation and belonging, as reflected in the increase in the first-person plural we when dealing with tragic events, seems to correlate with better mental health outcomes.
For example, increased use of the pronoun we among students coincided with a drop in visits to a university health center for several weeks after a campus tragedy.
Marriages also seem to benefit from the we-focused discourse.
Studies of marital satisfaction show that couples who use more second-person plural pronouns like we or us report greater satisfaction than couples who use more I words.
This isn't surprising if we think of we as reflecting a view of ourselves as part of a team rather than as individuals.
But in a romantic breakup or a personally stressful time, a shift to using the more self-focused I pronoun appears to help people situate themselves relative to the breakup or stressor.
When a destabilizing event occurs, whether in your romantic or professional life, an increase in the use of I seems to track with processing the event and shifting your identity.
Research on private accounts of romantic breakups found that the use of other focused pronouns, like the third-person pronouns she and he, increases.
And this isn't so surprising. After all, when we break up with someone, the relationship narrative is usually focused on how the individual, how I, felt, acted, or moved on in post-breakup accounts, at least in private reflections on the breakup.
And rather than signaling that you are moving on, the same study suggested that using more we pronouns after a breakup might indicate difficulty in adjusting to the end of a relationship.
So the pronouns I and we are quietly working for us behind the scenes.
Shifts in an individual's pronoun use over time appear to be a good indicator of emotional health, community connectedness, and relationship status.
So in the end, what at first might seem like innocuous little words deserve a little more attention.
As Taylor Swift so eloquently shares in her song, Me, you can't spell awesome without me.
But maybe it would be better to recognize that there is also a we.
That segment was written by Valerie Friedland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of Like Literally Dude, Arguing for the Good in Bad English.
You can find her at ValerieFriedland.com.
This summer, buckle up for a wild ride with The Pickup, where the plan goes sideways and the laughs hit hard.
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Watch The Pickup, only on Prime Video August 6th.
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This next segment is by Jane Sansonito. A, B, C, D, E, F, G. Makes you want to hum the alphabet song.
But there's no real reason why people should learn these letters in this order.
There are plenty of ways we could structure the alphabet.
The computer keyboard in front of me provides one alternative.
Plenty of other alphabets exist, too, as well as languages that don't use alphabets at all.
So why did we end up with this one, and who's responsible for it?
Well, as a historian, I love why questions.
I often like them a lot more than who questions, because it's actually really rare for a single person to change the world.
Instead, most of history's biggest innovations come from teamwork, collaboration, and groups figuring out how to make life better, easier, and more fun.
And the alphabet is a perfect example of this process.
Our ABCs, known as the Latin alphabet, are the result of millions of people over thousands of years slowly working together and ultimately agreeing on which letters to use and under what circumstances.
To figure out why they settled on the version we have today, you first need to understand what a letter is and what an alphabet is.
Then you can trace your way back to the very first examples of both.
So letters are symbols, just like emoji or crosswalk signs.
Letters are shapes that we, the users, associate with a sound in a particular language.
But many letters change sound completely when they appear in a different language.
The English H, for example, makes a HA sound, but the same symbol H is pronounced as EN in Russian.
And in the Cyrillic alphabet, H makes an N sound.
Even when the shape and sound of a letter stay the same within a single language, the letters themselves can have different names.
In America, Z is called Z, while in Canada, the United Kingdom, and pretty much every other English-speaking country, it's called Zed.
All this variety is possible because letters, like languages, evolve and change over time, based on what local people do out of habit or trend or just for the fun of it.
An alphabet is a collection of letter symbols that have been more or less standardized, and which often, though not always, reflect all of the sounds made in a particular language.
Some languages, like Chinese, don't have alphabets at all, using symbols to represent whole words.
Others, like Cherokee, use symbols that represent syllables.
The first alphabet was invented in ancient Egypt more than 5,000 years ago and was developed to record religious texts.
That's where its name, hieroglyphics, or sacred carvings, comes from.
Hieroglyphs are beautiful, and they do a good job recording prayers, but they're difficult to write quickly because they're so detailed and often take the form of animals, people, or day-to-day objects.
Over time, people developed simplified forms of each glyph so they could take notes and write informally.
Well, hieroglyphs were mostly used by priests and elites.
Common people, including travelers and traders from other places, learned informal writing.
These visitors realized that Egyptians had developed something useful, a way to record sales or send letters that would be clear to those who read it, but mysterious to everyone else.
Many people never learned to read at all because they didn't need to or because they were denied access to education.
The most important traders in this period were from Phoenicia, known today as Syria, Lebanon, and Israel, and they spread the alphabet to the towns and villages that surrounded the Mediterranean Sea.
The Phoenicians established alphabetical order to make it easier to learn and share with others.
But the Phoenicians and Egyptians only used consonants.
Eventually, as people began to write more and more, and more words needed to be created to describe different things, the Greeks adopted vowels.
Now, the Greek alphabet looks a lot like ours, but our letters took their final form in Italy.
First, the Etruscan people, and then the Romans, adopted Greek letters to fit their language.
The Romans spread their language, Latin, and its alphabet all over modern Europe, the Near East, and North Africa.
The earliest example of the Latin alphabet in use is called the Duenos inscription and comes from the 6th century BCE, 2500 years ago.
Even then, the alphabet was still incomplete because Latin didn't have all the sounds that are common today.
The most obvious is the letter J. Even though the first month of the Roman calendar was January, it was written with an I and pronounced Januarius.
The J came into use during the Renaissance, during the 1500s in Europe, two or three centuries after the W was added during the Middle Ages. and there's no reason to think the alphabet might not change again.
English, especially, has a habit of borrowing words from other languages, like karaoke from Japanese, cookie from Dutch, and avatar from Sanskrit.
Maybe, because of this borrowing, we might eventually need to add new symbols to our alphabet.
In short, as the world grows more connected, the alphabet may have to adapt.
It won't be the first time. That segment was by Jane Sansanito, an assistant professor of history at UMass Lowell.
It originally appeared in The Conversation and appears here through a Creative Commons license.
Finally, I have a familect story. Okay, so way back in the early noughts, I was a waitress at this restaurant called Steak and Shake.
I ain't seen any out here, but this was a long time ago.
And I walked up to a table that was about to go, and I very confidently asked them, Tabagogox? and they looked at me like my head had just floated away.
It turned out they wanted a tabagogup instead of a tabagogox.
But to this day, almost all my friends call a to-go box a tabagogox because of that one time decades ago when I walked up to somebody and just word salad-ed at them.
So that is my friend-elect story. Thanks so much.
That one made me laugh because we've all had those kind of days.
If you want to share the story of your familect, a word or phrase that you use only with your friends or family, leave a message on the voicemail line at 83-321-4GIRL or leave a voice message on WhatsApp.
Be sure to call from a nice quiet place.
And if you want that number or link later, you can always find them in the show notes.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast, and we have lots of other shows.
Tomorrow's Nutrition Diva show was especially interesting to me because it's about the safety of our drinking water.
And you didn't know this, but I was really sick last year for a while, and it turned out that we had bacteria in our water filtering system.
Here's a clip from the show. But at this point, you may well be wondering whether a water filtration system makes sense.
So let's talk a little bit about those, when it might make sense to use a water filter, and what kind you might want to look for.
For most people who are served by a municipal water supply, filtration is not strictly necessary from a safety standpoint.
But there are still plenty of reasons that some might choose to filter their water, ranging from peace of mind to concerns about specific contaminants to, quite honestly, just the taste.
There's actually a lot to know about your water, people.
Check out the whole episode tomorrow from the Nutrition Diva.
Thanks to Morgan Christensen in advertising, Dan Feierabend in audio, Holly Hutchings, director of podcasts, and Nat Hoops in marketing, who randomly lived with an A-list celebrity for two weeks during a summer in college.
But who it was is apparently a secret. And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl and author of the tip of day book, The Grammar Daily.
That's all. Thanks for listening.
