The Animate and the Inanimate Cover
Podcast Mentions

The Animate and the Inanimate

William Sidis

Sidis entertains the idea that life originated on Earth from asteroids (as put forth by Lord Kelvin and Hermann von Helmholtz) while describing his theory as a synthesis of the mechanical and vitalist life models. Sidis also claims that stars are "alive" and go through an eternally repeating light-d...

Podcasts 1
Quotes 5
Stuff You Should Know

It was written when he was around 8 years old and contained a language he created called Vendergood, which was based on Latin, Greek, and Romance languages, with its own grammar and conjugations.

"

The book was called Book of Vendor Good and the language was Vendor Good.

— Episode: The Sad Story of William James Sidis

Episode: The Sad Story of William James Sidis

It was written when he was around 8 years old and contained a language he created called Vendergood, which was based on Latin, Greek, and Romance languages, with its own grammar and conjugations.

"

The book was called Book of Vendor Good and the language was Vendor Good.

Yeah, not like just some gibberish or whatever. He took from like Latin and Greek and some of the Romance languages and figured out different ways to conjugate words based on this language and he created his own language.

It wasn't just some lame thing where words were replaced with words.

Yeah, I think there were like 8 cases or something, grammatical cases.

It was really impressive stuff and it was the kind of thing I saw somebody put it like a linguistics professor would have been well received for having written a book where they debuted their own language and this kid was doing it before he was 10.

Note: The book recommendations on this page are discovered automatically from podcast transcripts, and may be incorrect or incomplete.