How Language Shapes Thought | Lera Boroditsky

Good evening, I'm Alexander Rose, I'm the CEO of the Long Now Foundation. Thank you all for coming tonight and participating. It seems like I think we let everyone in from the outside row. Thank you, as many of you already know. We do these talks. We have a tradition called long short films. A short film that exemplifies long-term thinking. We tried to give these four evening talks a theme. For tonight, Austin and our office found this awesome one that was made for a radio lab episode. It's called words and it's about the interpretation of words and it has no words enjoy here in the pension I'll run away I'm serious I'm going to run away that's not going to fly light as a feather come light as a Feather like you, good night.

I'm Stu Brand from the Long Now Foundation. It has been a long time since I was surprised to become interested in

language

s. Our Rosetta project was really just an idea to discover that it would be fun to display something in a non-digital preservation format, but once. We discovered that no one had actually collected all the documented

language

s ​​of the world in one place, we started to dig into it and now the person in charge of Rosetta is Laura Welter, a linguist by training, and we found ourselves continuing to engage with the language we had . Dan came here a couple of months ago and had spent time with the AHA couple and Amazon and dismissed Noam Chomsky's approach to linguistics because it didn't fit what he saw in the field.

Our next speaker says that all anthropologists have this experience, please welcome someone who comes from psychology to linguistics. Take advantage of your key. Thank you very much for inviting me. It's a real pleasure to be able to talk to this crowd. The people at home. I study how the languages ​​we speak shape the way we think. and any discussion of this question begins with a basic observation that languages ​​really do differ from each other in what they require of their speakers, so let's start with a hypothetical example. Suppose you want to say this. You know it's hypothetical.

Let's focus on the verb yes. If you were to say this in English and this is something that happened in the past, then you need to mark it on the verb, so you need to say red instead of will read or will read or is reading etc., so you need to include information about the time . now in some languages ​​you wouldn't change the verb, in fact you couldn't change the verb to mark time, so in Indonesian for example the verb would always say the same thing, in some languages ​​you wouldn't just have to change the verb to mark the time. but you would have to find out how long ago in the past the event occurred, so for example in me, in the Papua New Guinea language, there are five different past tenses, depending on whether something happened just now or within the last two weeks or in a month or in a year and so on, you would have to use a different past tense in some languages, like in Russian, my native language, you would have to mark the tense, but you would also have to include in the verb the gender of the reader, so if it was Todd Palin who did the reading, you would use a different form of the verb than if it were Sara in Russian, you also have to change the verb depending on whether the event was completed or not in some sense, like this that if Sara read the whole thing from cover to cover assiduously that would be one form of the verb, but if she skimmed through it or if she just started it and put it down, that would be a different form of the verb in Russian, you also have to do this in the future . tense, which is very inconvenient when you say to someone oh, I will read your thesis tomorrow, you really have to commit to reading it all in some languages, like in Turkish, you have to change the verb depending on how you came to know this information, so if you witnessed this miraculous event with your own eyes, that would be one form of the verb, but if you just heard it from someone or maybe it's something you inferred from something she said, that would be a different form of the verb and, again, some Languages ​​make many such distinctions, so if you know something by hearing instead of by sight, instead of inferring it by hearing instead of inferring it by sight, you would use all these different forms of the verb.

So on the one hand, when people looked at such differences, they said, "Languages ​​really require very different things from their speakers. It must be the case that speakers of different languages ​​see the world differently just to be able to speak the language." grammatically". you have to pay attention to very different things on the other side, people have argued, not so quickly, just because people talk differently doesn't necessarily mean they think differently, maybe everyone notices all these different things and just depending on the language you speak. It happens that you include a bit of information or another bit of information, but it doesn't really mean that you don't know all the other things, yes, linguistic expressions are always very scarce, it's just that we only say a very small proportion of what we say.

I really know, so it could be that everyone really knows and pays attention to all of this, logically that would mean that all speakers of all languages ​​would have to pay attention to encoding all the distinctions that are encoded in all the languages ​​of the world, that is There is a large set of things, potentially very large, but it is not impossible, so that is the debate and the question of whether language

shapes

thought

is not really just one question, there are many interesting questions that we can ask, For example, you could ask what people who speak different languages ​​think.

In a different way, learning new languages ​​

shapes

your way of thinking. So if you take a French class or a Japanese class, are you just learning a new way of speaking? Are you really learning a new way of thinking? A new way to see the world? Do polyglot people who speak many languages ​​think differently depending on the language they are speaking at the moment some people some bilinguals report that they actually feel like they are different people so they say when I speak Spanish I feel like I have a different personality, like I was a different person than when I speak English.

There are some

thought

s that are unthinkable without language, if your language does not have a particular property or if you have not yet learned that particular property. There are some things that are impossible to conceive and ultimately what is basic, what is universal in human cognition, how languages ​​and cultures allow us to become as intelligent and sophisticated as we are, and is there any intrinsic value in all of it? this linguistic diversity? There are around 7,000 languages ​​in the world and they all differ from each other in countless ways. Does that have value? Well, now people have been expressing opinions on this topic for a long, long time, so here, for example, Charlotte Hmong, Holy Roman Emperor, says: to have a second language is to have a second soul that is a statement very strong about the value of a language one of his successors says that a man who knows four languages ​​is worth four men again another very strong statement another successor Frederick the Great of Prussia had a more specific set of hypotheses, he says, I speak English with my accountants, French, with my ambassador, Italian, with my lover, Latin, with my god, in German, with my horse, I'm not sure how you came up with this particular set, but this is the kind of thing that People have been positing for a long time that maybe German is better for reason or maybe French is better for love or maybe Hebrew is better for oratory.

There is no empirical evidence for any of these huge general hypotheses, but we will talk about more specific hypotheses. Now of course these guys had a lot of influence, not everyone was in love with this idea, so here's Jerry Fodor, he's a philosopher of mind and he says I hate relativism more than anything else, except maybe jet boats. fiberglass engine, he's a sailor, so he doesn't like all the noise and wake of those boats, but beyond those boats, the real bane of his existence is the idea that language can shape the way we that people think and their view really expresses what cognitive science and philosophy of mind and linguistics have come up with over the last few decades, people really became disillusioned with this idea that language could shape the way we think. what we think and partly because there is very little evidence for these kinds of effects, so what I want to do today is show you some of the new evidence that we have okay, so the question we have is whether the structures of particular languages ​​shape the way we tend to encode, represent, remember and reason about the world.

Well, and here is the outline of the talk that I will talk about in approximately four different ways. that language can shape thinking, these are four ways that I think are interesting, the first is whether language can have deeper early effects on cognition, the next is whether language can have broad or generalized effects, I will explain them later, if they are important. differences based on cross-linguistic differences and whether they are important real-world consequences, so let's start with profound early effects. What I mean by this? What I mean is that there are some cross-linguistic differences that can change the way you perceive the world.

So even the most basic aspects of perceptual processing, processes that are early in the cognitive pipeline, could be affected by language now. If you can show that something like that happens, that means that everything that happens beyond that early perceptual process will be affected. also and that's very exciting because we are getting a lot of information from the world and we can't process it all so we have to throw away a lot of information and if that's the case speakers of different languages ​​are throwing out different parts of their information perceptive. Once you throw out information early in the perceptual processing stream, it's gone and you can't get it back, so that's one reason why people have been very enthusiastic about looking for early effects on cognition and another.

The classic domain of appearance is color perception, so languages ​​divide the color spectrum in many different ways. Some languages ​​have only two words for colors, some have a ton of words and here's an example: These colors don't exactly look right, but just trust me, so in English there's a blue category that covers, let's say all the colors in the screen are here, but in Russian there is not a single word for blue, but two different words, you must create a distinction between light gala boy blues and dark blues look at me, that means that Russian speakers have to call these two colors with names different.

Does that mean that Russian speakers actually see those colors as more different from each other? Would it be easier for them? distinguish these two colors, so here is a really simple task. People show three spots of color. The color above is identical to one of the colors below. Can everyone tell which one is from left to right? So on homework, that's all they would have. What you have to do is press a button on the left or right to tell which is identical. Very simple task. You don't have to be very smart to perform this task.

If you were a pidgin, you could do this. correct task this is so you don't need language for this task the question is: does the fact that you make a distinction in your language really change how fast and how well you can do this task, so the task is set up like this manner? In some tests the color of the distractor, the color that you are not going to choose comes from a different linguistic category in Russian, then the two colors are identical and in other tests it comes from the same linguistic category, so for a Russian speaker this kind of The test on your left should be easier than the test on the right for an English speaker, of course, they are all blue.

There is no distinction, so both types of tests should be equally fast, of course the words never appear in the colors they are in. it's just there for your convenience now, when we started doing this study, we did it because I thought it wasn't going to work and I thought it would be a really good way to put some limits on how far a language can go in the cognitive realm. system, but I have two surprises coming: The first surprise is that there is actually a difference between Russian and English speakers in how they were able to do this task.

Russian speakers were faster on these types of tests than on these types of tests, while English speakers showed no differences even though they were looking at the same colors that Russian speakers were looking at, there is nothing in nature of the colors that were different, they were actually performing the task differently. The second surprise was that when we took people's ability to use language in the task, so while people were doing this task we made them repeat numbers to themselves and this overrides their ability to access their linguistic knowledge fluently when we did that. thateliminated the interlinguistic difference that now speaks Russian and English.

The speakers look the same now, which suggested to us that it was actually language that was intruding on this very low-level perceptual task that we would never have thought language would achieve and now that was a big surprise, suggesting that language can really reach into these very early perceptual processes and change the way we process even the perceptual world, okay, so that's color, what about something broader, something that applies to maybe more categories? different in the world? Here is an example, the broader types of generalized effects usually come from grammatical differences, so in many languages ​​there are grammatical gender systems where all nouns are assigned a different gender, so they are either masculine or feminine.

Example in Spanish, how many people here speak a line of grammatical genders so you have an idea, okay, so, almost all of you know what I'm talking about, okay, and it can be very frustrating. You know, it can be very frustrating. learning in a gendered language David Sedaris has this wonderful essay about how he got so frustrated learning French gender that he decided to refer to everything in the plural so he could get two toasters, two tomatoes, and two blenders and because then he wouldn't have to remember the grammatical genders are nothing, so one thing that is very convenient about grammatical genders is that they differ from one language to another, so, for example, the word for the Sun is feminine and in German, masculine, in Spanish the word for the moon is masculine in German feminine in Spanish Does that mean that people who speak German really think that the Sun is more feminine in some way, while Spanish speakers think that it is more masculine?

Could people really understand the meaning of these grammatical genders? Let me show you an example of how widespread grammatical gender marking can be in a language that has grammatical gender, so this is an example from Russian, so in Russian words that have different grammatical genders have different phonological properties, will sound different, you use different number words, so the word because one will be different depending on whether it's a masculine thing or a feminine thing, you'll get different adjective endings, different pronouns and possessive and even different verb endings, so, circled red, there is an example if you want to say in Russian my chair was white the word for chair is masculine so you use the masculine form of my then you have the word chair which has a masculine sound then you use the masculine form of was and the masculine form of white so you just marked the masculinity of a chair four times in four words you don't have much chance to forget what grammatical gender things are in Russian, a very pervasive feature of the language now, what an effective grammatical gender would actually look like, what it means if you I say, do you believe? of a chair as masculine or feminine you're clearly not thinking that it has biological properties that are masculine or feminine, what could that mean, so here's an example, this is Andriy McKean describing an experience he had while switching between Russian and French passing the summers with his grandmother says as a child he absorbed all the sounds of Charlotte's French language I swam in them without wondering why that flash in the grass that colored vivid perfumed shine sometimes existed in the masculine and had a fragile crystalline crunch The imposed identity seemed by one of its names, so it took that's the Russian word for flour and it's masculine and sometimes it didn't develop into a velvety feeling like a feminine aura becoming flu, which in French means flower and it's feminine, so that It is the type of cash. grammatical gender in semantics we are looking for something to take a different type a different form a different nuance a different connotation depending on the grammatical features it has in a language Now, do normal people have these types of associations or just sensitive young people? men who learn French from their grandmother, so here are some examples from empirical literature people people who are not poets who show this kind of effect Russian speakers this is a study done in 1915 an old study Russian speakers were asked in Moscow State University that will personify days of the week so act like Monday or act like Wednesday or act like Tuesday now these days of the week have different grammatical genders so Monday is masculine but Wednesday is feminine and what the Researchers noticed this is a study by Roman Jakob s'en when he noticed that people acted as if these days of the week really had genders, they act like a man on Monday but like a woman on Wednesday in another study to young children a Spanish speaking children were asked if we were making an animated movie and here all the characters and there could have been a clock and there could have been a fox and there could have been a pencil or something like that what voices should we give to these characters and they had to choose voices and even very young children were beginning to choose voices that were congruent with Kermit's gender, so the voice they wanted a clock to have depended on the grammatical gender in their language.

In another set of studies, people are asked to describe objects, so you just walk into the lab and they say, give it to me. three adjectives that describe a bridge and people have to give you some adjectives and the types of adjectives that people came up with again we are congruent with grammatical gender, so if your language is feminine you are more likely to say beautiful or elegant or extended, whereas if it is masculine in your language, you are more likely to say things like long, imposing and huge, and you can even see these effects with your own eyes if you go to an art gallery and ask how artists decide how to personify entities abstract in their art, so we did this: we looked in an art store, which is a giant art database, with about 600 years of artwork that we focused on and asked about all the personifications that exist in this art database.

Can we predict whether time or death? or the victory will be masculine or feminine depending on the grammatical gender in the artist's native language. The answer is 78 percent of the time we can make a prediction so you know if you want to make a bet, it's a pretty good bet and these. They are the kind of things you can see for yourself, for example, the Statue of Liberty, why is Liberty a lady? Well, she is French, she comes and in French Liberty is feminine or here you see John Ashcroft and behind him is the statue of justice that he I tried to cover up because it was very indecent and again you might ask why justice is a woman.

Well, justice is feminine in Latin. That's where it comes from. Here are some of my favorite examples. This is Michelangelo sculpting different parts of the day. dawn the day the dusk and the night and you will wonder why the dawn is a woman and the day a man and the dusk a man and the night a woman well those are the grammatical genders and this is a wonderful way in which this little quirk of grammar that we don't even know when you speak a language like this as a native speaker you don't even notice it, but it's making its way even into the physical world that we live in and it passes. in these physical ideas that other people inherit, well, now one reason to be interested in this funny quirk of grammatical gender is that grammatical gender is so pervasive in language, gender applies to all nouns, so if you can show that grammatical gender affects the way people think I think that means that this is a feature of language that is affecting the way people think about anything that can be named by nouns.

Now think about what are all the things that can be named by nouns. It's a lot of things, so if you look around you. world, that is a very, very ubiquitous affective language, okay, are there big differences in grammatical gender, maybe they are small, widespread alternations, but are there really big differences for the big differences? I think we need to turn to those parts of cognition where we really need to build the world where the world doesn't have the structure to give us we have to bring it the structure and a really good place to look for which are abstract ideas so take the time is one On the one hand, it is extremely popular, so the word time is the most frequent word now and in English, and other time words like year and day are also in the top 10, at least in the English-speaking culture we are obsessed with time, but even though it is so frequent.

It's uh, it's hard to get it right, it forms the very fabric of our experience, but you can't see it, time, you can't touch time, you can't smell time, why don't we create a mental representation of this abstract entity, this idea, this question of how you get mental representations of abstract things, has haunted people for a long time, it frustrated Plato, for example, it frustrated him so much that he came up with a very famous philosophical argument called a poverty argument. from the stimulus what that argument was is that the information available in the environment is simply not structured enough it's not complex enough it's not available enough to be able to create abstract thought and that's why it says I don't see how we could possibly learn these things and then its solution is that we remember them from past incarnations of our souls.

Now you may think it's okay. You know, that's Plato. That was a long time ago. What did the Greeks know? Anyway, Aristotle thought the brain was a radiator, so they didn't do it. I don't even know that the thought occurred in the brain, why should we care? Actually, quite modern ideas about the origin of concepts share some of these same properties, so here, for example, is Noam Chomsky from the year 2000, he even says words like carburetor and bureaucrat, in fact. raise the well-known problem of poverty of stimulus, however surprising the conclusion may be that nature has provided us with an innate stock of concepts and that the child's task is to discover their labels, there seem to be few other possibilities now, I would like to think that there must be another possibility, no, this is very, wouldn't that be really exciting?

However, if you were actually born with the idea of ​​the carburetor or a bureaucrat already at it that would be amazing, right? But since I don't know what The carburetor now seems unlikely, so let's look for other answers, so what would be another answer? Well, here's a story of how we come up with an idea like time travel. It's an elegant notion we have. It's probably not through personal experience over time. Travel well, it's not because you actually went and traveled to another time and came back and saved that experience, but there's a story here across languages, people use space words from space language to talk about time, so say things like that We are approaching the holidays.

Christmas is approaching, we are approaching the deadline and so on, now that metaphor establishes a metaphor and an analogy where time is a path and you are traveling along it well once you have that analogy in place, so the Time is a path and you are traveling on it, on a regular path, you can travel in any direction you want and at any speed you want, so once you have that analogy in place, allow for the possibility of time travel, now you can create that idea very easily. What kind of evidence could we have that this kind of way of constructing knowledge is actually possible or something that people do well?

So one question that could be asked is whether people construct knowledge of time from knowledge of space and the other is do patterns, language and culture really encourage how people encourage different ways of using space to think about space? time? Those are the two ingredients of the time travel story I just told you. One is that you have to have patterns and language that encourage an analogy and the other. is that you are reusing spatial knowledge in some way how to think about time, let me give you just a couple of brief data points. I'll pick the best ones I have, but if you have more detailed questions, I'd love to hear them. are okay now one way this is a good demonstration of how I stay oriented one way to test the idea that the way people think about time is based on how they think about space is to find cultures that have different ways of thinking about space and see If you also have different ways of thinking about time, to demonstrate the difference, why don't we all do this?

I'm going to ask everyone to close their eyes and I can see them so I can say it. Whether you closed your eyes or not, it's okay, now everyone is pointing southeast, it's okay, no, there are no traps, it'sokay, you can open your eyes. I see dots there, there, there, there, I don't know which way they are, you guys will have to figure it out. then let me make some observations about what they did: a cognitive psychologist, first, there is a really low compliance rate, many of you just didn't point out, we would have to remove you from the subject pool, second, there is a really long reaction.

It took a lot of time for many of you to point out and perhaps most importantly, the accuracy was not very high. Now I don't need to know which direction it is to know that, because you pointed in every possible direction, now there are some. places where asking a question like that would produce immediate correct answers from everyone, including five year olds, so I don't feel bad if you don't want to ask the people at Stanford, Harvard or MIT, they do exactly the same thing you did , it's just not something we keep track of, so what are these cultures that keep track of where they are all the time?

So here is an example of a culture that I had the opportunity to work with, these are the cooked, me or them. an Aboriginal group in Australia and the good thing about their language is that they do not use words like left and right to divide space, but everything is expressed in terms of north, southeast and west and by everything I mean everything on all scales, So you say things like there's a dog trying to bite your leg. Can you move your puppy a little northwest? The boy south of Mary is my brother in every scale.

In order to speak a language like this, you have to stay oriented because you Not only do you have to stay oriented to describe your experiences in the moment, you also have to remember which direction you are facing to be able to correctly describe any past experiences, so you have to be able to say things like Oh, I must have left my glasses west of the phone how silly of me right or after dinner you get home you say oh, they put their salad forks southeast of the dinner forks the Philistines right, so even to say hello , so the way you say hello and Kruk Tyler is in English we say how are you okay in cook tire you say which direction you're going and the answer should be something like north-northeast and the far distance what about you?

That's literally passing hello, you have to know which direction you are facing. Imagine yourself in your normal daily life as you walk around your office or walk around wherever you are. Each person who greets you must report the direction of your heading. You'll get your bearings pretty quickly. Otherwise you would be excluded from all social interactions as you would not be able to greet people properly, so people who speak languages ​​like this, there are many languages ​​like this around the world, people who speak languages ​​like this They have a great time. sense of direction, they are capable of feats of navigation that we used to think were beyond human ability, so we've known for a long time that animals, different types of animals, had orientation abilities that seemed to exceed the capabilities of human orientation, so for example we would say Oh, ants stay oriented quite well, they can calculate it, but they use a trick, they count steps, so it doesn't count, or birds, you know, they stay oriented, but they have magnets at the peak, so you know it gets us out of trouble.

Well, it turns out. There are people in the world who simply stay oriented by paying attention to where they are going at all times because it is necessary to be able to speak their language grammatically, so we have no excuses, it is not necessary. have magnets in their beaks to do it and this great sense of direction is seen in all kinds of cultural practices in art, so the art that people produce in these cultures is always done from a bird's eye view, it is placed on the ground and the proper orientation, etc., so what I wanted to know is remember that we are thinking about how people think about time and the question is if you think about space differently, does that also mean that you think about other things of different way? about time differently, so here is a task.

I give people a set of images like this. It turns out that they are photos of my grandfather at different ages. stir them up, I give them to you and say, put them on the floor so that they are in the correct order, well, here they are shown in the correct order, since English speakers perceive the correct order from left to right, this is how time passes for us now, of course, this left to right order relates to the writing direction, right, there's nothing intrinsically. It remains to be written about time and there are wonderful examples from the history of advertising where Nestlé, for example, has this logo.

This is part of their children's nutritional supplement program and every time they tried this and said it was an Arabic speaking country, they ran into some problems. because if you read this from right to left it's not clear what this product does for your child, so they had to rethink their approach and in fact, when people are asked to design things, think in temporal order. English speakers will lay things out like this, while Hebrew speakers will go the other direction and there's even a really fun find where, for whatever sentence you ask people, imagine that Bill is giving Susie flowers and draw that, well, English speakers will draw that with Bill on the left and Susie on the left. correct, but Arabic speakers will draw it with Bill on the right and Susie on the left, so why when we imagine an action does it seem to go in the direction of writing?

It's a cool and cool finding that all the actions that Imagine that they have this order of perception, okay, so go back to time, the cook ties or don't use words like left and right, so how will they organize the time? English speakers will do it from left to right. Hebrew from right to left. What will they do? Here's an example person, sorry for my messy field notes, so here's a person sitting facing south and these numbers represent the temporal order and these are a bunch of different image sets that they laid out, so here's everything it goes from left to right here is the same person on a different day this time they are facing north and now everything is going from right to left here is another person they are facing east and now everything is coming towards them what is the order of the Sun from east to west right now at first when you look at this pattern you might think wow, there's no order, they just do it any which way, they don't care if it's left to right, right to left or whatever, but actually another way of saying it is that it is the English speakers who do it out of order, why don't we think that time always travels with us with respect to the orientation of my body at the moment?

Time goes this way but now it goes this way but now it goes this way. Very egocentric. opening it's okay that time has to turn every time I turn around for them time stays relative to the landscape maybe as it should be okay now one reason to be interested in these types of examples is that they really demonstrate a difference great in cognitive skill between two cultures, most of the English speakers we tested on these tasks couldn't have done what the cook did because they simply didn't know which direction it was, so even if they wanted to distribute time from east to west They had no idea which way East and West were so they couldn't do it and those who didn't know which way East and West were would never have thought of doing it this way, it's just not the way we organize our world. with which we organize it. with respect to us rather than with respect to the landscape and I think this shows that there are some cross-linguistic differences that are not just a matter of degree of one group doing it more or less this way or that, but are simply qualitatively different. ways of organizing the world that people have and for me this is the most exciting thing is discovering these other ways that you can organize the world, other ways that you can see the world, it's there and it's almost like you can inhabit another universe . another parallel universe simply discovering a different way of seeing the world.

Well, we've been talking about how people think about time and so far I've given you two examples of what makes a difference and how people think about time. people think about space, so if you find groups that think about space differently, they will think about time in different things, but the other one was about cultural artifacts like the direction of writing, which also seems to matter, what What about the patterns, the metaphors of language and the language for time, let me? I'll give you some examples here: it's horizontal or vertical time. Here is a study comparing English and Mandarin speakers, in both English and Mandarin.

You can use horizontal terms to organize time, but in Mandarin vertical terms are also quite frequent, so in Mandarin it is the past tense. is up and the future is down, so the up month is the last month and the down month is the next month, does that mean that Mandarin speakers actually think about time vertically more than English speakers? ? Here is a simple task, stand next to someone and you say if I tell you this here is today where would you put yesterday and where would you put tomorrow one person just has to point so let me show you an example this is a dramatic reenactment what month is this can suppose I said, this is May, where would you put April and where are you okay?

June, there's another Mandarin speaker, so if I told you lunch is here, um, where would you say breakfast is okay there and where would you say dinner? okay, so let me show you another way to test this that's a little more implicit. This is a task you can try yourself, so you'll see an image like this and then you'll see another one. image that will represent an earlier or later point in time, so from here it's earlier, later, later, okay, okay, okay, some of these are complicated, okay now, instead of responding verbally As you were asking, we asked our participants to respond. pressing buttons and the buttons could have been arranged like this where the front buttons on the left and the back buttons on the right or they could have been reversed in the opposite direction to what English speakers like or they could have been arranged vertically with either the front button at the top or the previous button at the bottom and the question was: will there be some mapping that is more natural and that English and Mandarin speakers like more than others?

I feel like we know each other well enough. I can show you a graph first. of the conversation, so on the y-axis is the reaction time, so at the top it's slower and here we have English speakers on the left and English speakers are considerably faster when the previous button is on the left and when it's at the right doesn't do it. They like it when the previous buttons are on the right, but when the buttons are arranged vertically they don't care, they don't care if the previous button is up or down, but Mandarin speakers also prefer the previous button on the left. to the right, but unlike English speakers, they also have a preference on the vertical axis.

They want the previous button to be at the top. The previous past is up. They don't want the previous Baat button to be at the bottom. Point out that there is a general difference: the Mandarin speakers in our sample are a little slower than the English speakers and that is simply because our English speakers are always right about Stanford students, so they are selected to be able to perform arbitrary tasks. very, very efficiently. It is very difficult to find other people who are equally selected especially for this purpose, which is why there will always be a difference like this in the sample.

Well, now here's another interesting question: what about bilinguals? So for another set of metaphors instead of asking, it's time. horizontal or vertical now let's ask what is moving, are you moving in time or is time coming towards you? So in English, both things are there. Both metaphors are available. You can say we are approaching the holidays or you can say the holidays are. is coming and I'll skip the whole story which shows that people actually think those two scenarios are very different, although it is against the laws of physics to think of them as very different because over time there should be no ground. object that you're moving against, so those two things shouldn't be different, but we treat time as if it were space, as if it had this additional dimensionality, but still English speakers use both metaphors quite frequently in Mandarin most Some of the time people talk about time moving much more rarely people talk about themselves as moving in time and what we find is that hereThere is a summary graph of many studies, what we found is that Mandarin speakers above are more likely to think of time as moving.

Mandarin monolinguals are more likely to think of time as moving than English monolinguals, but look at the groups of bilinguals in the middle so that the Mandarin English bilinguals who were tested in Mandarin see each other. more like Mandarin speakers and those tested in English, which shows you that the language you're being tested in matters, so answer that bilingual question if you're bilingual and thinking in one language or the other. that makes a difference, the answer is yes, but look, neither of those two groups actually seem monolingual of either language and what that suggests is that the bilinguals, the ones who are tested in Mandarin, are affected by having learned English even though they don't speak English at the time and bilinguals who are tested in English are affected by having learned Mandarin even though they don't speak Mandarin at the moment, so they both have this long term, effectively, having learned a language that is affecting you even when you're not using that language, but also this immediate effect of switching between two languages ​​where depending on the language you're speaking you're going to think a little bit differently, it's a great way to try it out. and here is just another example, this is an example from the Aymaras in South America in I Amara, so in English, the future is ahead of us, all the best is ahead, the worst is behind us, we hope with longing for next year and so on in Amara the future is behind and the past is in front and in this wonderful study, Sweetzer and Rafael Núñez observed how people gesture when they talk about time and the Aymara people gesture towards the front when they talk about the past. and when they talk about the future they gesture backwards, a good investment, okay, so I think in that time domain you've seen some pretty big differences in how people think that time can completely reverse its direction, can take on a Extra dimension, you can go. from east to west instead of left to right those are some pretty big differences well there are constant real world differences with real world consequences now of course in the real world people actually care how things are called and The way you know it is that people are constantly arguing about what things should be called and they are constantly trying to change the names of things.

If that weren't so, if people didn't think that the names of things mattered, you would never do it. They have that kind of behavior and there are some pretty surprising examples right? Do you call someone anti-abortion or pro-life? Do you call a regime a government structure? Or in a ministry we call people freedom fighters or insurgents or terrorists who are taking very different perspectives. Does the US government sponsor torture or is it just torture techniques? Improved interrogation? very serious consequences if it's a government bailout or it's a bailout It turns out that a lot more people support the same program if you call it a bailout than if you call it a bailout or an older example of Bill and Monica having sex, the impeachment case arose from the definition of this word in English, which is a pretty serious matter.

So here's a sillier example, but I think it rings true at some point, maybe 10 years ago, the California Prune Board, the California Prune Board, asked the FDA to let them change the name of their product. from prunes to dried plums now, just to be clear. Prunes and dried plums are the same thing, in case you don't know, why would they want to do that? Obviously, it's a good idea because prunes, the word plum, live in a terrible linguistic neighborhood, what are prunes' neighbors with old age? laxatives right there remind you of all kinds of things that healthy young Californians might not want to be reminded when they buy snacks where the dried plums are they live in a perfectly charming linguistic neighborhood their neighbors are dried apricots, dried mangoes and dried kiwis All kinds of tasty things, things that you could take on a hike, so they thought it would be the case that young Californians would be more interested in buying dried plums and they were interested in buying prunes, so it cost millions of dollars get them.

They approved this change and it was worth it. Dried plums sell better than prunes. Eventually they had to sell prunes and prunes side by side because some people actually wanted the laxative properties of prunes, while others wanted the delicious and healthy snack of prunes and of course, anyone who If you have traveled you know that your products with strange names are sold all over the world; For example, Pocari sweat is a very popular soft drink, so throughout Asia buyers are not concerned about the connotations of the word sweat and something that is drunk. And there's a reason I think you can all guess why this drink hasn't become a big seller in America and it's because maybe advertisers understand that something called sweat might not taste as sweet.

Returning to more serious topics at events in the world. You know, language requires us to interpret events in the world and even the smallest and shortest instantaneous physical events require us to find some way to make sense of them, so let's take this example. Dick Cheney goes hunting, he has a quail hunting quail. accident, he accidentally shoots his hunting partner Whittington in the face. Now he said it's a split second event and there's a lot of different ways we could interpret it, so this is from the European Herald and they said Jane eBags, Cheney's lawyer. went out looking for lawyers and got one now um, you could say straight up sharing Cheney's shooting of Harry Whittington, you could say Cheney shot Harry Whittington, you could say Harry Whittington was shot, skip Cheney completely, no need to mention this is what Cheney said this was when he was taking full responsibility for the event and he said well ultimately I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the bullet that hit Harry and you can talk of the other conditions that existed at that time, but that is the bottom line. line and no, it wasn't Harry's fault, but look, that's very nice of him, right, but look at that first sentence, ultimately I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the bullet that hit Harry by a fraction. of a second, but now, therefore, it's actually a chain of four events and it turns out that he is at one end of those events where Bush actually did better look what he did said he heard a bird flying and turned around and he pulled the trigger and saw his friend wounded, that is a masterful exoneration.

Janey transforms from agent to mere witness in one sentence, of course, the onion always has the best headlines, they say that Whitehouse had prior knowledge of Cheney's threat . The August briefing warned Cheney determined to shoot the old man. A face with these descriptions differs in how much power does Cheney have in the case? Do we describe him as the person who caused the outcome or was he just one end of a long chain of events that created the outcome? Was he involved at all? and languages ​​give us many there are many tools to interpret events each event needs to be interpreted in some way, so in English you could say John broke the vase or the vase broke.

I'm going to call this type of construction agent and the other non-agent now in Spanish, for example, You can also say something like John broke the vase or the vase broke, but in English it is this type of construction, John broke the vase , the agentive construction, is more canonical when non-agentive language is used, it sounds evasive, it's something politicians do or little kids do when they're trying to get out of having done something, so you know, mistakes were made. We all have favorite non-agent uses that we have seen in Spanish politicians' clothing. It is the non-urgent part of the construction that is more canonical than the yes. was that if something was an accident you wouldn't say he broke the vase you would say the vase broke he would use this clinic say here to market and there's an old joke comedian American comedian and Mexico says oh nothing in this country belongs to anyone It's the fault that everything is still fault because you know that every time something goes wrong he says something or someone else says he did it now this property of Spanish is actually quite common in the world's languages ​​and English seems to be an outlier in terms of how agents we want our descriptions are like this in English, you can even say things like I broke my arm in many languages, you can't say something like I broke my arm unless you're crazy, unless you specifically went out looking to break your arm and then you broke it Well, it would just be a really strange thing to say.

Do these kinds of differences in how languages ​​tend to describe events really matter, for example how people assign blame or how they punish agents of events or maybe even by witness memory here's an example. Sorry it's so dark. I will narrate it. We showed videos to people and the videos contained intentional actions or accidental actions, so here's someone intentionally popping a balloon. Well, maybe you could see that and hear the same action. also burst a balloon, but this time it's an accident, okay, so he moves his arm back and is surprised first. We wanted to know if English and Spanish speakers really describe these events differently, so here's what English speakers said about the accidents, one guy said. he broke his pencil while trying to write with it he lowered his hand and picked up a sticky note or lost a balloon I like this a man opens an umbrella that opens automatically the umbrella is already opening automatically why does someone have to open it but in English someone he even has to open an umbrella that opens automatically or they made personality attributions the clumsy guy knocked a box off a table in Spanish the cases looked quite different so people said things like an egg that fell on him broke or the pencil broke or you were going to put something away and the drawer closed just the papers stuck to your hand some keys stuck through it or out of nowhere a pencil broke in two it's not the kind of thing that happens in English so here it is alone showing you the differences in the descriptions in graph form for intentional actions, they all describe events agentively, but for accidental actions there is a difference.

English speakers produce more agentive descriptions than our Spanish speakers, so what happens to people's memory if you're not describing who? You did it if you're not paying attention to who did it, maybe you don't remember who did it either, maybe that wasn't an important part of the event to pay attention to, so now we're showing people a third part, so sometime. the task people could have seen these two guys performing different actions now we introduce a third character and he does the action in this case by popping the balloon there he goes and we ask which of these guys did it the first time, so it's like an alignment you just have to say can you remember who did it and this is what we found for intentional actions, everyone remembers who did it pretty well, but for accidental actions, well, English speakers still remember who did it pretty well, where they are Spanish speakers remember less well, that is. one less important thing to pay attention to when it comes to an accident is very specific to the type of descriptions you would produce for that event, but very important potential consequences, right, and this is just a Japanese replication and skip, let me give you , another example, does it matter how much we blame or punish people?

In one study, we looked at a large number of court cases, so around two hundred thousand court cases are heard in the central court in London, and we asked a simple question if your judgment contains an agent expression like broke down, you are more likely to do so. found guilty that if your trial contains an expression that is not part of the agenda, such as broke and the answer is yes, if there is friendly language in the transcript of your court case that goes To have a better chance of being found guilty, we also wanted to know how much it matters, how much linguistic descriptions really matter, so what we did was show people Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction, so if you guys I probably won't show it to you.

Now, because I don't want to upset the censors, but this was an event where Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson were performing at halftime of the Superbowl and for 9/16 of a second Janet Jackson's breasts were shown on national television, It was a big problem. and Justin Timberlake actually coined theterm wardrobe malfunction as part of his apology. That term didn't exist until he apologized for wardrobe malfunctions and now people have wardrobe malfunctions all the time, so we showed people the video they saw and gave them an agenda that we wrote up a report on. news about it or a non-agential news reporting phrase, they're actually the same report except for a couple of transitive constructions in there, so the question is how much more do you have to pay for a transitive right.

So if you get it, if you got it, if you got nailed with the transitive construction, how much is that going to cost you? Well, in the case of Justin Timberlake, people wanted 53% more in fines if we said he tore the costume instead of the broken costume, that's a pretty good for a simple transitive, so this is where, if you've left me , just review some of the reasons why I think the examples I show you are really about language, so you might ask if language really shapes thought. or is it the other way around, maybe people who live in different places think differently and that's why they talk differently, how do you know which way the direction of causality goes?

Here are some ways we've tried to figure out that one has I've been in language training studies, so the idea is that if language really shapes thinking, then you should be able to teach people a new way of speaking and that should change the way they think properly and that's exactly what these studies have done and that's exactly what In language preparation studies, I find that you teach people a new way of speaking and that, without realizing it , it also changes the way they think of another person. He kept saying things like the burnt toast and the undone collar and the splattered paint and then they had to remember a bunch of actions.

Would they really be any worse at remembering who did it after hearing that kind of Nod agent language? The answer is yes, yes We are surrounded even within an experiment with non-agent language that changes what you pay attention to another are verbal interference studies, so I talked about this at the beginning of the talk when the color case if you eliminate the ability of people to use language in tasks that often changes their way of thinking that often changes what they can do actually makes us quite stupid not being able to use language we don't realize that we are solving many tasks linguistically but that is what we are doing and there are many studies that show that if you remove the language at the moment, that really changes what we are able to do and one last case is bilingual studies, so you take bilinguals and systems when you see a language or another.

If the linguistic context makes a difference, the immediate linguistic context makes a difference and you saw an example of that, it matters whether you take the test in one language or another and the other way to find out is to compare bilinguals with monolinguals and see if Have learning another language at some point in your past makes a difference and the answer is also yes, so these are some of the ways to establish that causality that language really plays a causal role; Of course, the influence also goes in the same direction. In another way, languages ​​are tools that we create for our purposes, they are tools that adapt to our cognitive needs, so it is not only that language shapes thinking, but also that differences in thinking, differences in The language goes both ways, so some things we've done.

Learned people who speak different languages ​​think differently. There are many different aspects of language that can shape thinking, from grammatical and lexical differences to spelling, how language is written, metals of language, and even low-level perceptual decisions. This was quite surprising to me. Learning new languages ​​can change the way you think and we see this in bilingual studies. People who have learned another language are not just learning a new way to express their thoughts. Without realizing it, you actually change the thoughts they want to express based on the languages ​​they are learning. Sometimes people think differently depending on the language they are tested in bilingual, since both languages ​​or the number of languages ​​you know are active. to some extent, when you're thinking, even when you're not using that language, there is a long-term effect of having learned a language.

One example I couldn't show you is that learning a new language can even change the way you speak. your native language, so we saw this with Indonesian English bilinguals in Indonesian, you don't have to mark tense or aspect, you don't have to put temporal information in sentences if you don't want to, it's optional, but Indonesians who have learned English requires this, applies it in every sentence. Indonesians have learned English, they are starting to put more temporal information into Indonesian, so they are actually changing the way they speak their native language based on this other language that they have learned and eventually each language provides us with. its own set of cognitive tools, it encapsulates the knowledge and worldview that has developed over thousands of years in a culture, an incredibly rich system of knowledge that lives within each linguistic system.

Well, I hope I've shown you at least a little bit of evidence to suggest that languages ​​really do shape the way we construct reality and help us be as intelligent and sophisticated as we are. There is one thing I agree with Noam Chomsky on: he says that when we study human language we get closer to what some might call the human essence, the distinctive qualities. Considering that, as far as we know, what is unique to men, what I would like to suggest is that if we take seriously the idea that languages ​​really do differ from each other, then each of those languages ​​is creating a human essence something different, a slightly different way of being human in a different way of seeing the world and interacting with the world and that could be a potentially very exciting idea now you might think okay, language is deeply funny, you were telling us that it shapes deeply and fundamentally how we think, but sometimes we just don't.

It doesn't seem to work, so here's an example that people try to change to effect some linguistic change and it's just silly, so here the US Congress decides to change the name of potato chips to French fries. freedom. This is when France refused to go to war in Iraq that she didn't want. join our Coalition of the Willing and this was his way of getting back at them, and that seems stupid, but this is not new, so during World War I, for example, everything that had a German-sounding name became in Freedom, something like that. There's a reason these kinds of substitutions don't work and it's because they're based on a flawed theory about how cognition and language relate to each other, so words that you can simply replace one with another in language are synonyms. , so If two words can go equally well in any sentence, that means they have the same meaning, they are synonyms, so when you do that kind of replacement, what you are saying is French, it is synonymous with freedom, so the potatoes Fries are freedom. french fries french toast is liberty toast french poodles are liberty poodles french kiss their liberty kiss and then you have liberty manicures well what should we call France then land of liberty and French would be the language of liberty?

You are setting up the wrong type of mapping, so what? What I want to suggest is that if we really understand how language and thought interact in the mind, we can even be nationalist in a more effective way, so if we really want to annoy the French, I say let's take all the things that the French hate and let's call them French. will really bother them, for example, ketchup becomes French sauce, McDonald's will be French coffee, shorts will be French pants, mimosas will be French cocktails, Disneyland will be France, Americans will be French, the English language will be called French, You will understand that, thank you very much. and these are the people in my lab who helped make all this possible and our funding sources who are also very helpful.

Thank you. Bring your questions. Let's see, let's put them here. Well, I'm really excited about your questions because I heard my talk before, so this is the new part. Well, I have a quick question you asked so much about stacking well bilingual, whatever the word is, being ISM linguistic bilingual, it's a belief system, yes, a religion, possibly anyway, you learned Russian first when you were a child. then english when you were how old 12 ok still pretty young I guess the question would be people learning the language a certain way when they are very young and then another way in school or traveling when they are adults does it matter which one comes ? first on how they are handled by a linguist I like the word bilingual because I can't invite linguistics without falling off my chair so it definitely gets harder to learn new languages ​​as you get older and this is true for many different reasons why many people use that as an excuse for not learning new languages, but I have a different way of thinking about it and that is that now it will be much easier to learn a new language than it will be. in ten years, so you should start now whenever you want.

No, it's not too late, it's never too late, but it's definitely a lot easier now than it will be in the future, so you should do it now. There definitely seem to be differences in The languages ​​that you learn from the beginning, the languages ​​that you learn, the ones that you use the most and the languages ​​that you just used have the most influence on cognition and, really, this is a set of principles and fairly old cognition, so there are sort of three three things that best predict behavior and its primacy what you learn first the frequency what you do most often and Rhys sees what you were doing and language doesn't seem to be different from that the things you learned first the things you do most often the things you were doing are the ones that have the most influence you're making some gestures while you're saying that and even Tomlinson has a question and where do gestures come in?

Wondering if there have been studies that Look at how the use of your hands emphasizes a spoken word is something that you know develops in these different languages ​​and affects the way we think about things like that, so speakers of different languages ​​gesture in ways different and the study of gestures has just entered the scene. in the last two decades it's something that people didn't used to look at in language and there's an incredibly rich source that it's impossible to talk about with gestures without paying attention to your own gestures, I don't know. how gesture researchers give talks and it must be very difficult, but one thing that's interesting about gestures is that we gesture, of course, we gesture communicatively for other people, but if you've ever seen someone talk on the phone, they still gesture. correctly, which means we are also making gestures to ourselves which actually helps you think and that is why it has both functions, it is not only to explain something to another person, but it also helps you retrieve a word if you ask people who sit on their hands.

While they perform many cognitive tasks, for example, even saying what words or words, if they slow down, we want to be able to have our hands to make gestures, if that's what you're used to doing, we have a question. Hi, from Holly, could you raise your hand to address that issue. How about languages ​​that are primarily gestural sign languages? Have you done any studies on spatial systems in sign languages? Do you know how they are represented in three-dimensional physical space? My laboratory. You haven't done studies on sign language, but other people have and they're very interesting, so there are a lot of different sign languages ​​in the world and of course sign language is facial in nature and things They are actually represented in space. unlike time like spoken languages ​​do, so there are all kinds of interesting decisions that sign languages ​​also have to make, like, am I going to represent left and right with respect to myself or with regarding the recipient?

Things like that and how does that work well? Different sign languages ​​solve that problem differently and that's huge. You have to figure it out. Yes, two versions. One version of this question is. Rick Bond asks what experiment you would love to do but can't and my version of that question would be what questions are you asking yourself these days in this topic area? So the experiment that everyone in psychology wants to do but can't is to get a desert island or a collection of desert islands and perfectly control all of them. theconditions on these islands and you raise different groups of children with different exposure to information, or you raise them with only exposure to German or Spanish or you raise them with information about their gender or not, or any questions you may have about origins, is that so? nature is nurture, that's the thing, that's the experiment that everyone wants to do, obviously, for stupid ethical reasons, you can't go around buying islands and raising groups of children, at what time and in what way you want, so we have to come up with other substitutes. to get to that causal story, but or find natural cases where cultural groups differ and compare them, obviously, I don't really want to raise children and controlled conditions on islands, just to be clear, but the kinds of things where I'm thinking now.

It is how we construct internal experience. I think that's the next set of really interesting topics because the internal experience, how you feel, how you think, you know what it means to have an idea, when an idea starts and when it ends or when. Do you have an idea, how long does a thought last or what does it mean to understand all these internal experiences? They are so important to us and how we interpret ourselves and how we act and so little is known about how we come up with them. those ideas just that one I think versus I have a thought that suggests it was there before versus I created you have do you have flashes in those hundred different languages ​​doing internal events differently? well if you have a thought then a thought is a noun for a thing, something right, something you can have, other languages, it would be masculine or feminine, that's right, or it could be a process, it could be something you do, instead of something you have, could be a property of yours, mm-hmm, I'm thinking.

I'm a thinking person and there are some really interesting differences that people have found in property attribution, so here's a study by one of my colleagues at Stanford, Greg Walton, he and others noticed that if you express something in terms of a noun category, so you say I'm a carrot eater or I'm a chocolate lover, that seems more permanent than if you say I love carrots or I eat carrots or I love chocolate, so he thought: could we really change people? about how much they think about themselves? I love carrots or chocolate by just having them write I'm a carrot lover instead of I love carrots, so they brought people in and told them this is a handwriting recognition study, just write this sentence five times and people write this. phrase they think it is a totally arbitrary phrase half of the people write I am a chocolate lover and half of the people write I love chocolate and the people who write I am a chocolate lover then say that they love chocolate more and want to buy it more chocolate and eating more chocolate wanting to eat chocolate more times in the future regardless of the consequences of circumstances etc., these kinds of small grammatical differences can even have an effect on how you think of yourself and therefore language It certainly differs and how they describe personalities, for example, which is why some languages ​​have wonderful noun categories for personalities.

Yiddish is famous for this. There is a Yiddish term for every type of personality you can imagine, and in fact, many English personality terms are borrowed so that you can say that someone is an idiot or his immense confidence there is a cluck or a putz and so on and so on and so forth. these things are and so the question is that a more permanent personality ascription than you would have if you used an adjective or if you used a verbal description what is interesting to see if people who speak different languages ​​really think that personalities can change or not depending how they express them.

I understand why you study advertising a lot. Advertise, you provide some of the best examples. They are smart people who are thinking about how you behave. you really solve that problem, people who work in advertising or are never surprised that language is important to the way people can see the things they think, it's strange that someone thinks otherwise, they are reading your stuff and you They invite them to their conferences and things like that, I think? you already know I think you need me to tell you Lera I have a question I have several questions here people wonder about gender they seem strangely attracted to the topic of gender but here is a good question from Jeff Jonker who asks about languages ​​If languages ​​have more systems besides dividing noun categories into masculine and feminine or some languages ​​that are masculine-feminine and neuter, have you looked at languages ​​that are multi-gender or have other different ways of constructing gender?

Yes, a lot. of languages ​​have the system that we talked about masculine feminine neuter, that's a really boring case. Many languages ​​have much more interesting ways of dividing nouns into gender, so some have up to 16 genders; there could be a gender for hunting guns or shiny things or all men except canines or something. That's okay, there are all kinds of different categorizations that languages ​​make my favorite is the one I studied in college, the Yaki language, and they have a four kingdom category, squishy things around squishy things and humans fall into that category. , as George Lakoff made famous a grammatical gender.

Famously, there is an Aboriginal language in Australia that has a gender for women, fire and dangerous things. Those are one gender. Most people remember that's the title of his book, but most people remember that the title is Women, Fire, and Other Dangerous Things, but in fact, that's not it. In case it's just women, fire, and dangerous things together, though, the English used to call hurricanes by female names. Now he was a psychologist. Was it a loss or a gain when we walked away from them? Only female names for hurricanes. No no. I would like to speculate, but there are no streaks like that, there are streaks like that in languages, for example, in Hebrew all diseases are feminine, so when a new disease is discovered it will always be feminine, why do you think languages ​​need these categories? hmm, well, categories, I mean, categories are useful, so every word is really a category, so chair, a word like chair, very prosaic word, but there are all these different things that are chairs, they look different , they feel different, they smell different, okay and so word chair is a category and all other words in any language are two languages, in addition to those categories of words, they also have these grammatical categories, some people study, for example, with grammatical gender, it's useful for keeping track of what's related to what's in a sentence, so in a language like Russian, you might know dependencies between words that are seven words apart and it's really difficult knowing if this adjective modifies this downward or towards that known and if you have three grammatical genders that increases the probability that it is not.

It's so ambiguous that you'll be able to track what goes with what, so that's a useful case, but actually we love to categorize humans, we love to put things into categories and organize our world and look, you're all sitting in these organized places. chairs and I've been saying spatially segregated from you and you're parked and these wonderfully organized parking spaces outside and our streets are organized in blocks, you know, that's what we do, we were wonderful organizers and the language is a masterful case. of that, trying to create a structure in the world, an arbitrary or non-arbitrary structure, some structure I think is arbitrary, but many of them are not right, so our chairs and tables are arbitrarily masculine or feminine or are they masculine or feminine in languages ​​for a particular reason.

One thing we tried to answer that question was we first compared grammatical genders in a bunch of different European languages ​​and what we found was that there is a correlation between the genders of animals, so cats are feminine, dogs are masculine. everywhere, not everywhere. it's just a correlation, but for the artifacts we didn't find any correlation, so it seemed pretty arbitrary. We also asked English speakers who hadn't learned any gendered grammatical language to predict, we say you know, chair, table, it can be masculine or feminine, and for animals again they could. to predict, but for the artifacts they were not, so there seems to be a lot of arbitrariness.

One way to look at it is to look at how language assigns genders to new words that come into a language, loanwords, so my favorite example is the word giraffe, so Russian and German didn't have a word for giraffe until relatively recently. , for obvious reasons, there were no giraffes to talk about and so the French go to Africa, see giraffes and come back with this wonderful new word giraffe for this mythical creature in the and the Germans also want to talk about giraffes, so they borrow the french word dref now in german uses the same spelling of the same alphabetical system as the french, there is an e at the end of the word and anything inside it is likely that i will eventually become feminine in german so giraffe becomes a feminine word in German.

Russian uses a different alphabetic system on anything that has a consonant sound and the ending takes on a masculine grammatical gender, so it becomes a masculine noun in Russian, so the same word. adopted almost at the same time in two different languages ​​and assigned based on these principles of convenience, which was in French, anyone knows, lose your ass, of course, I have a question, Michael Lyons, could you talk about relative vocabularies, for example Eskimos have 57 words? for the snow or something I feel like I have to deal with in California Spanish is a relatively simple language in the sense of one word, one thing, and English seems to be full of all kinds of solutions and if I were to get Alzheimer's, I would prefer to have it in English than in Spanish because you can always figure out something that looks like what you are trying to say, so languages ​​increase your vocabulary when a language is spoken in many different places when a language is written when many of different professions speak the same language, that's when languages ​​end up with larger and larger vocabularies, so you can use those factors to predict how big the language's vocabulary will be.

Spanish is a very rich language, okay, sorry, you frowned when I said it. It was simple, well, I wouldn't have characterized it that way, but in all cases where we acquire experience, we also acquire vocabulary uniformly, and we were talking left and right, and we do it with respect to the speaker or the addressee in In some cases you just have to know, for example if you're a sailor you don't use left and right on a ship, you use port and starboard because if you have to say "oh wait, you're right or I'm right" it might be es too late, so you want to avoid any kind of ambiguity like that to develop new vocabulary to solve that problem.

Aboriginal sailors would use the cardinal points, yes they would, and sailors also know that they would normally orient themselves with respect to the wind, so the direction of the wind is what determines many things, I think that is their type of wealth, there is a Co Co development if you develop vocabulary for the things you want to talk about or the things you want to think about in more detail. detail, but also once that vocabulary is developed, if you are a child who is born until a language that has that vocabulary you have to learn it, you have to learn those distinctions and therefore there is a kind of reciprocal set of relationships, people develop more vocabulary than the next.

One group of people learning the language has to learn those distinctions and the next group can even refine the vocabulary and so on, but it doesn't go to infinity. It seems that different cultures have a kind of enough words, thanks to women or. That is not the case? I don't know, we know a lot of words, how many well, I don't know how many you know, but there's probably some number of English that you know, the kind of English that a college-educated person will have. X number of words, there are numbers like that. I don't think actually the number of words is significant enough to count because in many languages ​​there is even the question of what counts as a word, so if you speak an agglutinative language and you can put together many different pieces, you can create what would be a word that's like if you know the Eskimo example, you can say peed on snow, you know it's a new word because you can put all those parts together and it's 58 words for snow. far from having that is a really important category don't boil that snow there aren't 58 words but I think it really makes the case for Eskimo snow words.

I think it raises a very interesting question about what counts asword and what does we say that a language has a word for anything, so how many words for snow does English have? Does it have a word for snow or do we also count sleet and sleet and dust and fresh? and skiers have more words for smell skiers have more words for snow yes there are many different categories so I have a question about vocabulary and categories. This comes from a question from Erin Mills, who asks if the orientation towards cardinal directions that you saw among Australian Aboriginal languages ​​do you think or do you have any evidence that that we can know that many of these languages ​​are disappearing rapidly because people are changing to the dominant languages ​​there?

I guess English, so the idea is whether these categorizations survive a change to another language. It's an interesting question. What I saw in Pompeii raw in this community, many people there speak English, but the entire time I was there I only heard one use of the word right and never left, so when people give instructions in English at the Parral pond in Instead of using left and right, they don't use north, southeast and west either, but what they do is point in the right direction and generally gesturing in the right directions is very important. People do this all the time, so if someone says, oh, what are they? what you're doing today you might say Oh I'm going to Melbourne and they might say Oh Melbourne and they'd point in the direction of Melbourne even though it might be 2000 miles away but that's an important part of communication when I first got there. something I had was a really difficult problem that I had to solve, I wasn't prepared for which people were asking me where are you from and it's kind of unusual because I speak with an American accent and that's the way TV speaks.

It wasn't clear if it had come from the TV or where it had come from but people would say I'm from California but that's an understatement, you have to point in the direction where you're coming from and So I had exactly when I had this problem. Which direction are you pointing to California from Cape York? Do you go the way that the fight was or do you want to go like the bird in a straight line or are you going across the land and So the first few times I was asked this question and asked to point, I pointed inconsistently and I think the People thought he was quite a sneaky character because he was clearly trying to hide from them where he was or didn't know which one.

It would either be really weird or I wasn't really being honest with them, so it took me a little while to settle on a simple, easy way to point. So you think this use of gestures is some kind of stopgap strategy so what? Do you think their children would do it? Do you think they would keep those gestures or do you think they would maybe adopt the English system completely or I mean, do you see that as a stage of linguistic and cultural change or do you think those Wait a minute, it's hard to predict. I mean, there are a lot of things we do with gestures that we don't do with language.

For example, in English, English speakers gesture from left to right during the beat, so you say first we did it. this then we did this then we did that but we never say Tuesday left from Wednesday you know I still have a lot of things to do left from the party everything so we don't use terms left and right to talk about time but still in gesture that's the pattern we have , so it's conceivable that a pattern could be an injection and a very strong gesture but it doesn't exist in the language and that would be one way that the interpersonal years in the culture because as long as something else keeps it alive, I have a couple of questions about limitations Jeremy Faludi clearly says that language shapes thought, but what overrides language, for example, Hungarian has no gender or pronouns, but Hungarians are as sexist as anyone else and you nod your head.

Jason sbar says: Do you have any examples of thoughts or experiences? that cannot be expressed in language and in a sense we are going towards what is the horizon of this continent that you are exploring so clearly that there are many structures in the world that we can discover even if language does not. keep those categories so that in the case of genderless Hungarian or Finnish languages, you know that it is not the case that Finnish speakers can only reproduce by randomly bumping into each other every once in a while an accident happens and a new Finnish speaker is born clearly I discovered that there are these two biological genders, even if it is not in the language, but even in cases like that, if we look at the children who acquire these languages, this is a study by Alexandre Gora.

He did this study in the 80's. I loved this study. He asked children learning Finnish, English and Hebrew the same question: are you a boy or a girl? at different ages. Now this is something for kids to figure out and I had all kinds of clever ways to ask. This didn't require using the terms boy and girl in language, so I would have lots of pictures of boys and girls and I would know to take all the girls and put them in one pile and all the boys and put them in another pile. and then he would take a Polaroid of the child and say and here is your photo with a battery, will you come in and so on?

What he found was that Hebrew is very, very highly gendered, and even the word for you is gendered in English is kind of an intermediate case and then Finnish has no gender marking, so what he finds is that children Hebrews understand it first, they discover first whether they themselves are a boy or a girl and then the English children and then the Finnish case, now eventually everyone discovers it more or less correct, but there is this developmental difference that it takes longer to discover a category if not It's available in your language, so I think it's a beautiful example of how language can change the timeline of development of things that can't be expressed in language.

There are many things that language is. Really bad at any kind of space stuff, so if you've ever been to a bakery and you want that one, no, that one over there that you keep pointing out, it's very, very difficult to specify exactly which one you want. Aboriginal people would be great. with that they just put it to the southeast, that's right, but there are also many quality experiences on the lake that are difficult to express in language, so Vikram Stein had this wonderful example: he says you can, it's very easy to express the height of Mount Kilimanjaro in language. but it is very difficult to express the sound that a clarinet makes in language, how would you describe the sound of a clarinet?

It's much more difficult, so there are some types of things that seem to be much more suitable for the linguistic framework than other types, but we have other ways of representing them, in fact we do one more question from you and another for me and I think we'll finish the question. tonight, so I'm going to take the project of sitting in this chair and interjecting my own question, so This is kind of a follow-up to the question about what experiment would you love to do but can't do and this goes back to John's editor's question 2006 Brockman: What do you think you can't prove because you've proven it? right or at least I tried to prove it or experimented with several different things, but what do you believe about human language that you can't prove well?

I think what I would like to see, my goodness, what is very difficult to capture in any experiment is the whole. of relationships between all the different subsystems of language, so it's one thing to go in and say, well, the spatial system is like this, the temporal system is like this, and the gender system is like this, but all of these things are actually working together in Any natural speaker of a language is using all of these things, so what I would really love to be able to do is start putting those pieces together and my feeling is that when you're not just looking at one, a little bit at a time, but when you actually When you're putting together a complete system, there are much more complex differences that emerge that we can't measure yet at this point, but it will be really exciting to see what it takes to be able to measure those differences at the system level. as opposed to differences from individual experimental examples, so that's what I'm looking forward to.

I don't know how we'll do it, but we'll try a quick follow-up question: Do you see the field of linguistics moving in that direction? A lot of linguistics has become experimental in the last 10 years and also a lot of linguistics has become computational in the last 10 years and that's really exciting because it's becoming a much more empirical discipline and I think part of that is because that technology is improving and our understanding of linguistic differences is improving, so if you have data to extract and you know how to extract it, that opens up all kinds of questions that you couldn't ask before.

My question relates to how, as a scientist, you combine and manage your curiosity and your performance apparatus, so I guess I would ask you: have you gone to Burning Man several times together and how did your curiosity and performance aspects develop, and going to Burning Man and what happened there, well, I already talked about it. Before I mentioned learning other languages, like exploring another world, finding a new way to see the world, of course another way to explore another world is to go to another world, so you can think about going to another country or even go to yourself .

You don't have to go to another country, you can go to a neighborhood that has a different socioeconomic level than you and see a totally different world and I think Burning Man has the same flavor of experience for many people where they feel like they travel to a world that has a different set of social rules and a different set of aesthetic criteria. When you go to northern Australia or Indonesia, you don't usually drive a banana-shaped car, so do a little research on the Burning aspects of your performance. Man, do you know what that was about?

It was actually just for fun, so many years ago when I was this tall, some friends and I built this giant banana vehicle that was meant to be a banana trojan for all of us to do. We'd go up inside and we'd break in and invade another camp and no one would hurt the banana. It was such a hot thing that no one would turn down a giant bright yellow banana in their camp, but then we'd all jump up and try to steal their beer. I feel very confident about the future of science, yes, you.