John McWhorter

No one noticed, but that's called the great vowel shift.

It's a great idea.

Folks, imagine the vowels.

Do any of you have chinchillas?

Of course, so you put them all in a cage and they're always kind of moving all around each other.

Chinchillas are like vowels.

The vowels in your mouth are always kind of moving around.

And yes, there is a such thing as a change shift where it almost seems like the language is trying to keep things clear.

That's a weak force, but just as often the vowels fall together and create homonyms that give you trouble or a very typical language thing.

I'm sitting here, I'm flying by the seat of my pants, and so unfortunately I'm going to have to go into a weed.

Here's the weed.

There are languages spoken in northeast Siberia.

I'm not even going to give their name, but that's where it is.

And think about it in English.

So we have what?

where, why, when.

All of them begin with wuh.

You kind of like it that way.

It makes them easier to learn all of those question words.

In these northeastern Siberia languages, you have a series of words like that 5,000 years ago that all begin with kuh, and they all feel alike.