Masoud Golsorkhi What is your academic background?

Arum Natzorkhang I’m in my second year in community college, but I’m more or less completely self-taught when it comes to ancient languages. Lots of young people who are drawn to historical linguistics – myself included – do so through the strangest outlet, writing fantasy novels. When you’re envisioning this massive world, you can’t help but think about the way that Tolkien created languages and then created worlds to justify making those languages. I realised if I wanted to make a convincing world, I needed to go and make a couple of languages. The problem was that I didn’t know anything about linguistics at that time, so I started studying. I picked up an Arabic grammar book, which I actually still have, and just kept reading and reading. I became absolutely fascinated with the subject and eventually I dropped the fantasy novel writing altogether and pursued this instead. 

MG How did you learn? Explain the process to me.

AN Unfortunately, the only way you can learn a lot of these ancient languages is through books. You’re not going to be able to take classes in Old Persian, you have to go and blow the dust off an old book. A lot of the resources on various ancient languages were written in the 19th century by Western academics. Learning through books gave me all of the information I needed.

MG Your Classical Arabic pronunciation on one of your posts was absolutely impeccable. How did you learn the pronunciation?

AN There’s only so many different places your tongue can go in different parts of your mouth to make these sounds, and you have a whole bunch of scholarly work that’s dedicated to describing them, but instead of saying “Your tongue is going back in your mouth”, we’d call it a “pharyngealised” sound. To do that, you restrict your larynx to a specific position after releasing the sound. It’s all very technical, precise terminology, but it can be done. 

MG How many languages would you say you’re an expert in?

AN My specialty is within classical Indo-European languages. That would include languages like Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Old Persian, Old English, Old Norse – the languages spoken within what is now Europe, Iran, South Asia and India.

MG That’s the largest family of languages in the world, right?

AN In terms of the number of speakers, yes, but there are some families like the Niger-Congo that can compete with it, which includes languages like Yoruba and Swahili. Besides Indo-European, I also dabble in another family called Afro-Asiatic, which includes Semitic languages like Arabic, and also ancient Egyptian. I also go and read hieroglyphic inscriptions. Occasionally I’ll do something like Sumerian, for instance, but that’s quite a challenge.

MG Why is Sumerian outside this family of languages?

AN It’s what’s known as a language isolate. Languages like French, Spanish and Italian are related in the sense that they all come from a common ancestor language. That doesn’t necessarily apply to all of the languages of the world, and sometimes a language is just its own thing, where we can’t find any sort of relative. Sumerian is an example of that. We see words in Sumerian and we don’t see any sort of exact parallel that we can drop between other languages. It’s something that we see with other languages like Korean and Basque.

MG And Finnish as well?

AN Finnish forms a family called Finnic, which is itself a branch of the Finno-Ugric family that includes languages like Hungarian, as well as some lesser-known languages spoken in Norway and Sweden, like Sámi. There are relationships between Sámi and Finnish – of course, the word for the Finnish language in Finnish is Suomi.

MG What about Korean?

AN Korean forms its own family. However, some theories have proposed that it might be related to Japanese. When we think about language studies outside of Indo-European families, there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done, and so it’s just a matter of time and manpower to figure out all the different connections. There are many different scripts that we have yet to decipher. In comparison to other fields of science like chemistry or philosophy, linguistics is actually rather young. It only began when the Indo-European family was first discovered in the early 19th century. 

MG What do you do other than being on TikTok?

AN I am, unfortunately, unemployed, so the majority of my income is from TikTok. But people will ask me for the strangest things over email. I am currently working on a curse that someone wants me to do. The ancient Greeks had the strangest demands for their spells. I have to go and buy a pot that was used for smoked fish and inscribe a message into it with a bronze stylus and send it to this guy so that he can curse his ex-girlfriend so no lover will approach her. That’s just one example. There was another person who wanted me to de-curse a necklace that she got from this crazy lady at a thrift store. Another person wanted a Sumerian penis enlargement spell. Often history channels on TikTok have a very large foreign audience, and when you have that large a sample size, you’re going to get some strange requests. 

MG What has been the impact of AI in the field of linguistics?

AN The way that ChatGPT works is that it tries to emulate human language by building a massive database of texts. The problem with that is that if you don’t have the text, then it often doesn’t produce very good results. You can see this in earlier large language models, which weren’t making good Latin or ancient Greek translations. However, later models pick up on that, and you can now copy-paste a Latin sentence and break down all of its grammatical intricacies. It’s something that I’ll occasionally use and back it up with actual texts and sources, but I wouldn’t necessarily use it all that often.

MG I imagine it’s not necessarily going to make that much of an impact, because there isn’t much for it to learn from. A lot of linguistics must be a detective game of figuring something out from very small data sets.

AN Historical linguistics focuses on trying to find etymological connections between related languages through sound correspondence. In our conversation, you’re able to understand me with my American accent because you have subconscious sound correspondence that allows you to decode the differences in our accents. You know that I, an American, pronounce an R at the end of a vowel, but you don’t pronounce it. We can find these sound correspondences across different languages, sometimes thousands of years apart, and determine what the common ancestor was like for it to have evolved into the languages that we see today. Not to be insulting, but a lot of people who approach me regarding ancient languages for AI are a bit over their heads when it comes to this sort of thing. The technology just isn’t ready yet. AI can certainly do some amazing things: there’s a programme that’s able to go and read Babylonian tablets, for instance, and we have thousands of undeciphered tablets in various archives and museums. You have projects like the Herculaneum papyri, a collection of carbonised scrolls – you can X-ray them, and an AI algorithm can detect the material and chromatic differences between regular papyrus and the ink printed on it. It’s able to digitally unroll these scrolls without the danger of damaging them. I can see AI being used there, but in terms of finding etymological connections, that’s probably still going to be a human endeavor. 

MG You’re only at the beginning of your academic studies, but do you want to make an academic career out of this?

AN I want to focus on getting lesser-known texts published, and getting modern scholarship written about the lesser-known texts that may have already been published. I have the Egyptian Book of the Dead here. It has all of the funerary spells, both in Egyptian and in English, that a pharaoh would need to travel into the afterlife. This edition, which is the only one of its kind that actually shows the hieroglyphic text, was produced in the 19th century. It hasn’t been updated since it was published in 1895. Egyptian scholarship and linguistics scholarship have evolved tremendously within those 120 years, and yet we’re still using sources from the 19th century. Having an updated edition of the text, which perhaps includes emendations in certain readings of signs or different interpretations when it comes to translations, can really help the up-and-coming linguistics students trying to find these texts in a more accessible format. That’s what I’m trying to accomplish. 

MG As a linguist, can you summarise why it is such a good thing to do? What has it done to you?

AN The study of language bleeds into every other aspect of social science. I see people in my comments who have very, very strange ideas about how language comes about. I recently made a video talking about the similarities between Arabic and Egyptian, and there were people in that comment section under the impression that Arabic came from ancient Egyptian. But that’s not the case. It’s a Spanish and Italian situation where they descend from a common ancestor language that isn’t written down. That seems to be a very complicated idea that not many people understand, because they have a limited view of what language is and how it works. This aspect is very influential in the way that we view history, right? So much of that is based on communication and language as well. When you go and talk, for instance, about ancient Greek dialects, and the influence of classical Arabic in relation to theʿāmmiyya, the colloquial dialects of Arabic, you see how states can place one type of speech above another. To understand how languages work and why they function the way that they do provides a more well-rounded understanding of how we communicate in general and how history is communicated to us.

MG Languages are constantly under pressure to be standardised by authorities, which they constantly resist. Persian has had several attempts at purification, with the last one in the 1920s by the Pahlavi regime, where they tried to get rid of all the Arabic words to make it more Aryan and more white. Another example is Atatürk getting rid of many aspects of the Turkish language by standardising its written form. Sometimes, in the case of the Koran, the purity of classical Arabic has been a source of great cultural power. But other times it is really stupid to stop Persians using Arabic or French words. How do you regard these attempts? 

AN Language purity means different things to different people, mainly due to their upbringing. When you talk about the linguistic purity of the Koran, it’s not based on the idea that all the words come from Arabic, because they don’t. Some words in the Koran come from languages that originate in India. Grammarians will make up pronouns in classical Arabic that are never used within speech as a means of trying to make it seem more regular. This doesn’t apply just to Arabic, either. Sanskrit grammatical theory relies on organising the language into various sounds, and some of these sounds aren’t very common in the language at all. When we’re talking about linguistic purity, we’re talking about a state, a cultural consciousness, that needs language to be pure. The purity of the language is not the end, it’s merely the means to show something, right? If we wanted to use your example, purifying Persian was not the end goal, the end goal was to be perceived as more Persian. The way that people who don’t study linguistics perceive and talk about language is very culturally contextual, and so when we see these attempts to purify language, we should be asking the question, what is purity? What is “filth”? Why? Rather than trying to make these languages more pure, I think that the presence of foreign elements and non-standardised elements attests to humans and their wonderful ability to adapt communication over the centuries, between different groups in various contexts. That speaks to a very beautiful thing that, ironically enough, can’t be described with words. 

MG What are you working on now?

AN I’m a poet, and I’ve been slowly working over the months on an epic poem for the English language, taking great inspiration from the classical poems of the Bronze Age, like the Rigveda. The desire to craft an epic poem has declined, not only within the English language but within modern languages in general. I want to bring a true epic for the English language to the vast corpus that this language already has. I’m writing this story about a merchant from Ethiopia in the Bronze Age traveling to the various countries that existed back then – ancient India, Babylonia, ancient Egypt – and seeing how these different societies function, what unites all of these different groups under this identity that we call humanity, and what separates that from nature. Through this, I’m trying to bring classical metre back to colloquial language. In the 20th century, there was this boredom with classical metres, and I suppose that my poetry is a response to that. I’m trying to bring back classical metre back into Modern English in a way that hasn’t really been done in around 400 years. I’ve showed it to a bunch of people and I’ve done videos on it, and I’ve been getting nothing but “my mind is blown” type reactions. .