Fossils in Your Mouth: Excavating the Human Story in Our Words

Engaging, thought provoking lectures by experts, professors and storytellers in Ottawa bars 📚Lecture: Fossils in Your Mouth: Excavating the Human Story in Our Words ⏱️Time: Doors: 6pm Lecture: 7pm 🎤Speaker: Joshua Miguel Orille (Linguist & Interpreter and Translator) Most people go to museums to look at fossils. What if I told you your mouth is full of them? Every word you speak is a record of humans meeting, trading, migrating, conquering, and borrowing from one another. If nobody is an island, neither are our words. This lecture will explore etymology, the study of where words come from and how their meanings change, as a way of reading the record sitting on our tongues. Our dig site is Filipino, a language shaped by centuries of trade, migration, and empire, where the layers of human contact sit close to the surface. Our tools, however, work on any language, including the one you grew up speaking. From Plato to Saussure, we’ll use linguistic theory, etymological method, and historical analysis to excavate words the way an archaeologist works a site, layer by layer, and uncover the people who left them behind. What’s in a word? More of us than you’d think. Joshua Miguel Orille is a linguist by education, a translator and interpreter by training, he holds a BA in Modern Languages from Universidad Antonio de Nebrija (Madrid) and an MA in International Affairs from Carleton University (Ottawa). He currently works as a policy analyst at Global Affairs Canada with professional and academic experience spanning Canada, Spain, France, and the Philippines. Outside the office and classroom, you can find him playing Pokémon, making perfumes, or on another flight to Madrid.