Lera Boroditsky, How the Languages We Speak Shape the Ways We Think

join me giving us strong Santa Fe welcome to Mr. Arab if so, I will tell you about language and I will do it using language, of course, because I can and this is one of these magical abilities that we humans have. We can plant ideas in each other's modernity using a finite set of words that we recombine into an infinite set of new meanings, so what I am doing now is producing tones, whistles and snorts with my mouth as I exhale and those are creating vibrations of air that travel towards your vision, impact your eardrums, make your eardrums vibrate and then, from those vibrations, your brain reconstitutes that signal into thoughts.

I hope and what that means is that I can plant all kinds of strange ideas in your mind using the right language. so I can say: imagine an ovulating zebra riding on the back of our stress while solving differential equations now, if everything has been going relatively well in your life so far, you haven't had that thought before, it's a new thought and I just got it implant. in your head using language, so this is a very powerful tool that we humans have, but of course you don't have just one language. There are at least 7,000

languages

​​spoken in the world that have been spoken in the past and the language is different from one another in the kinds of things they require of their

speak

ers just to be able to

speak

the language grammatically.

Let's start with a hypothetical example to so you can know why it's hypothetical let's focus on that verb read the most hypothetical part now if If I said this in English, I have to change the verb to mark that this is something that happened in the past, so if it's something that will happen in the future, I would say well, the reader is reading, if it is happening now, there are some

languages

. which like English requires tense in verbs but there are some languages ​​that don't use 25 verbs at all, the verb never changes so in Indonesian for example it would al

ways

be the same form of verb in some languages , they require time, but they are much more specific about what they require, for example in me, this is a language spoken in Papua New Guinea, there are five different past tenses, so depending on how long ago it happened something, you would change the tense of the verb to just happened instead of within a couple of weeks within a month and so on.

Children of languages, in addition to tense, require the gender of verbs correctly, so if it were Melania who If I read in Russian, for example, my native language, it would be a different form of the verb than if it was Donald in Russian and it also used to change depending on whether the action was completed in some sense, so let's say it was Donald, he read everything from cover to cover. tail, that would be one form with the verb, but if you skimmed it or chose It you finished it and you didn't finish it or you're still in the process.

That would be a different form of the verb in many languages. You have to change the verb depending on how you came to know this information. This is called evidentiary information. You have to mark your evidence, so if this is something that you witnessed with your own eyes, that would be one form of the verb, but if it is something that you have heard or inferred, that would be a different form as a verb and, again, languages differ. in the types of evidence that require people to mark, so in some languages ​​you have to distinguish between something you heard and something you saw, and something you inferred from sight or from sound or from something someone says. sale and many distinctions possible now languages, of course, not only for the things that require at the beginning but for all kinds of things, so if I just want to tell you where I live and I want to say, oh, it's a blue house on the left of the big tree as soon as we try to start translating this into any language we read the problem arises for example some languages ​​don't have number words so there is no way to say exactly 7 and some languages ​​don't have a word that corresponds to the English. blue some languages ​​will have only a couple of color words some languages ​​will have a single word covering blue and green some languages ​​will be mutts will require people to be more precise and distinguish between light blue and dark blue for example in some languages ​​you can No I say left because words like left and right are not used and instead everything is put in some kind of absolute direction like space north, southeast, west, so I would have to say that I live in houses northwest of the big word tree volcano. or c word for big tree, so of course I have to know where the volcano is and where to see it in relation to my house and in many languages ​​there is no generic word for tree, but you have to be more specific.

I have to say what kind of tree that eucalyptus is, is it a red cypress, etc., and since we're in, I want to give you an example from Swann, which I love. You don't need to read the entire slide, but these are. Navajo verbs come out of different modes of consumption, so there are different kinds of

ways

that you could eat things and Navajo verbs are just exquisite and the kind of information that they encode and require, but here, for example, in the part Below there is a distinction. I love it, it's a distinction. between drinking something from a bottle and from glue, so in English, if you say I drank beer yesterday, that doesn't seem incomplete, it seems like you said something that was perfectly fine, but in Navajo you would have had to distinguish in the manner. of drinking, what made something open or closed, continues well, so when people have considered these kinds of differences, an intuitive idea is, of course, speakers of different languages ​​have to

think

differently because what languages ​​require our speakers pay attention to such different information. just to be able to talk, but on the other hand people have argued, you know, just because people talk differently doesn't necessarily mean they

think

differently because it could be that everyone pays attention to the same things and everyone remembers the same things. same things. but just choose different elements to talk about, so for example, if I tell you it rained this morning, which I think is true, don't think, oh boy, but she didn't mention that it only rained outside, not inside this room, so you shouldn't marks evidence or if I speak a language that does not distinguish different ways of drinking maybe I still encode that information.

I still pay attention to it. I still know it even though I don't include it in the sentences I produce, so this creates a puzzle, could it be that everyone is paying attention to all this stuff? Logically, that would have to mean that everyone has to pay attention to all the things that are included in all the languages ​​in the world, which is potentially a very large set of things. that we must pay attention to an encoding at any given moment and we now know, after many years of work in psychology and neuroscience, that our attention in memory is very, very poor, much poorer than we would like to believe, so Which creates a question: Is it true that speakers of different languages ​​actually see the world differently.

To what extent do language and culture guide what we see in the world now? This is a very old question and people have been offering opinions on this question for a long time, so superficial mom here and for the Holy Roman Empire says to have a second language is to have a second soul one of his successors Charles the Fifth says that a man who knows four languages ​​is worth four men very strong statement something to put on your resume several languages ​​good way for your company to save money and one of his successors, Frederick the Great of Prussia, had a more specific set of hypotheses, he said: I speak English with my accountant, French with my ambassador, I am Howard to my lover, Latin to my god and German to my horse.

It's unclear how he came up with a specific set of assignments, but this is the kind of thing we've all heard well. You've heard that there is a language that is excellent for romance and there is another language that is excellent for reason and there are others. language that is excellent for arguing now there is no empirical evidence that such broad category differences exist. I'm sorry to say that there is no language you can learn that will automatically make you a great lover. there are other things you have to learn apparently now this idea that Language

shape

s thought has become very popular and then has become very popular and disgraced in different periods of time, so in the 1970s and 1980s in the cognitive science it became essentially taboo to think about how language might

shape

our way of thinking. and here's a quote from Jerry Fodor, he's a philosopher of mind that just expresses how much he hates this idea.

He says that he hates relativism more than anything else, except maybe fiberglass powerboats, and you can imagine all the reasons why he doesn't like electric fiberglass. motor boats, but apart from that, the bane of their existence is the idea that the languages ​​we speak can shape the way we think, so since this quote there has been a lot of new empirical work trying to understand whether languages ​​think. people who speak different languages. differently, apart from having strong opinions one way or another, can we put any scientific basis behind these questions? That's what I want to do today is tell you some of my favorite examples from the scientific literature, so I'll talk about how we think. about space-time, color, gender, to some extent, events, guilt, punishment and number art with time, so I've done a lot of work on how to think about time.

I'm not the only one who is obsessed with him. Time is the most frequent now in English and other temporal words like year and day are also in the top 10 and this is a fairly common pattern in European languages. People talk a lot about the weather. Now there are a couple of things we used to know when I started working on this. How American English speakers organize time, for example, it's very natural for people to organize series of events from left to right and it has to do with how we used to think about how the brain is lateralized, so people used to say, well, People are often right-handed. of them and the brain is not symmetrical, that is why time has to go from left to right.

If you read and write a language that goes from right to left like Hebrew Arabic, then you will also organize your time from right to left and let Just give you a nice example of advertising: this is a Nestlé product, it is a nutritional supplement for children and they can read this logo very easily and see what this product does for your child. When they started marketing it in Arabic speaking countries, they ran into a problem because if you read it from the list of rights it is not very clear what this product will do to your child now.

The other thing we used to know about time is that the future is in front and the past is behind and again people are not made. biological arguments for why this had to be so, of course, we have faces in the front, not the back, we generally walk forward, not backward, so our bodies are asymmetrical on the front-to-back axis , that must be the reason why the future is in front, but it turns. They are places where the future is not in front so this is the work of my colleagues or ourselves minions any Sweetzer studied the IMR a group that lives in the Andes and for the I Amara in their language the future is behind the past is in from the front and when they looked at the way people gesture, the way they move their bodies when they think about the past, about the future, it was really just her in front of them when they were talking about the past, so you could say that That was a long time ago. and I gesture behind them when I talk about the future and the reason the imy do this is, of course, because the past is known, it is manifest, you can see it, the future is unknown, that's why it's behind your head Now, time does not have to be running, the horizontal axis can acquire new dimensions, so, for example, in Mandarin the past is up and the future is down and in many studies and also in observations of gestures, speakers are seen of Mandarin arrange time on this vertical axis in addition to the horizontal representation now.

Time doesn't have to be only in relation to the body either, so this is work that I had the opportunity to do with an Aboriginal community in Australia. These are the people who hire kitchens in Cape York and they are one of these groups that don't. Don't use words like left and right and instead put everything in the north-southeast-west space so it tells them things like there's an ant in your paw southwest or move the keys a little to the northwest, in fact, way you say hello and coupe tires to say where you are going and the answer must be precise, something like north northeast and the far distance, how about if you have reason?

So imagine that every time you greet someone when you pass them on the street you have to report your direction of travel, you would be quite oriented.quick, let's do an experiment here right now, so close your eyes and I can see you to know if you are not a program, now point to the southeast, okay, you can open your eyes, I see. points here here here here here I don't know how it was important. I still don't know which way it is from asking you guys, so don't feel bad, this is completely normal and I asked a room full of Harvard professors.

MIT professor Stanford professors do exactly the same thing even if they've been coming to the same room for forty years they still don't know which direction southeast this is normal but pompously Rao stands next to a five year old and I say, hey , can you point southeast? They will pinpoint without hesitation, of course I have to. I took out my compass to check it because I never remember that the question we had was can these people stay at origins in ways that we used to think were beyond human ability and Since you don't use left and right for space, how do you think about time?

So I took on this simple task. These are photographs of my grandfather at different ages and he was shuffling them and stacking them and saying, lay them on the floor so they're in the right order and so I've placed them here from left to right like an English speaker would do and what would he do? the cooperative tire. Let me show you a little information. This is a person who is sitting facing south and these are a bunch of different sets of cards that they have organized and you can see they have done each one now from left to right here is the same person now they are sitting facing north and now They have arranged everything from right to left here is a different person they are sitting facing east now they have made everything closer to their body what is the pattern from east to west?

So, of course, one way to describe this data is, oh, how strange, every time they turn their body, time changes direction, but it's actually different. The way to describe the data is to say no, actually for them time always goes in the same direction, regardless of how you look at it, it is for us, but we make time chase, so if I look this way, then the time goes here. Looking this way time goes this way funny this way next time it goes this way It's very self centered of me to make the dimension of time overshadow me every time I turn my body for them time always goes this way to the west, so time doesn't You don't have to go with respect to the body you can go with respect to the landscape and also training doesn't even have to go in a straight line so this is a work by my colleague Rafael Núñez history of youth no , this is a group in Papua New Guinea and for the youb, no time you enter the village at one angle and then once you get to the village you turn around and leave the village at a different angle and that has to see with where the source is in the mouth. of the Yuca River are important places for young people, no, so they just don't care about the fact that time must be linear for them, it doesn't have to here, now we can ask through all these linguistic crossings. differences how we know language is creating the difference and how people think about time and of course when comparing people from radically different cultures it may be that language is giving a clue but it may also be many other practices and cultural artifacts. that create those differences that we observe in an experiment, so one thing we can always do is take the studies into the lab and teach people new ways of talking about time, so bring college students and English-speaking students into the lab and Teach them new metaphors.

We teach them Mandarin metaphors for time, for example, and after they have learned to speak in this new way, we can test them again and see if they start to think a little like Mandarin speakers and that is exactly what happens when you you teach people. to speak in a new way you are teaching them to think in a new way too and that tells us that language has this causal power. You can change the way people think by changing the way they speak. Let's color. Then, of course, the world provides for us. a continuous spectrum of color and our languages ​​divide this color spectrum into discrete categories some languages ​​have only a couple of words for light and dark or cold and warm color some languages ​​have many more words for color and where the language is placed Boundaries between colors differ from language to language, so let me give you an example from Russia, so in Russian the things that we call blue in English cannot be put under one label, so there is a separate word in Russian for light blue, avoid dark blue edge, etc. studies you may ask, does that mean that Russian speakers think these two colors are more different?

Is it easier for Russian speakers to visually distinguish those two colors than for English speakers? Colors that transcend the limit. The answer is yes and this is true. through any comparison you can make between languages, so English speakers can distinguish blue from green better than speakers of languages ​​that don't make that distinction and the same is because Korea and Korean make an interesting distinction in the yellow green space that English doesn't make and that's why it's easier for Korean speakers to make that distinction visually than it is practically because here's another curious thing: the language creates categories sometimes out of nothing, so in languages like Spanish, many European languages ​​all nouns are of a particular grammatical gender, so who here speaks the language with grammatical gender expands where everything is masculine or feminine, many of you one thing that is important is that these genders differ between languages, so, for example, the Sun is feminine in German, masculine in Spanish, the moon is a scale in German feminine and exactly the opposite there doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason in how these genders are assigned and in fact many comedians have written about his difficulties learning languages, grammatical genders, so Mark Twain wrote an essay called the horrible German language, where he basically writes about how the language is meaningless in part because of this grammatical gender system and David Sedaris and we talk quite a bit of a day about his difficulty learning grammatical genders in French and finally solved this problem by only referring to things in the plural, so yes, you have to toast, he only has to buy two toasters because you can't stand the embarrassment of making a mistake with the gender, so the question is, once you've learned a language like this with grammatical gender, are you really done?

Just when you started thinking that the Sun and Moon are somehow more masculine or more feminine depending on what gender they are in your language, now I'm going to point out that if you speak one language and one drama genre, this is an incredibly ubiquitous characteristic, so what here again is an example from Russian in Russian, words of different genders have different sounds, you are with them they use different endings of adjectives, different pronouns and possessives, even different verbal endings, so let's say you want to say something simple since my chair was white in Russian, well, you.

I would have to use the masculine form of my, so you have the word chair which has a masculine sounding ending and then you have the masculine form of one and the masculine form of white. Now you just said something simple about a chair, but you have marked the masculinity of that chair four times in four words, right? And in fact, if you continued this in the next sentence and didn't even mention the word chair, but I, and everything was so comfortable, you would have to continue accepting. Continue to do everything, but with something feminine like a stool, then you would have to make everything feminine.

Language like this has many opportunities to forget what grammatical gender GIS is, it's an incredibly ubiquitous part of the system, or giving you an idea of ​​what it would feel like to see an object as masculine or feminine when you see it in different languages ​​is an example of a memory of a Russian boy who learns French from his grandmother's house, so he looks at a flower and thinks about it either in Russian where it is masculine or in French with feminine so he says when he was a child he absorbed all the sounds of the French language by Charlotte .

I swam in them without wondering why that shine in the grass that said color sent its living shine sometimes existed in the masculine and had a fragile and crunchy crystal and an imposed identity achieved by one of its names that she took, that is the fever by the masculine flour and sometimes it was wrapped in a velvety seven that felt like it became Fleur Frenchman feminine flower, so here it's giving you this really vivid sense. of looking at the same object and experiencing it differently with different grammatical genders, of course one might wonder if this is something that only happens to Russian children who learn French from their grandmother or is it something that happens to people in general Many studies have been done on how people perceive and think about objects based on grammatical gender, so in some studies researchers ask children to give voices to characters. animated to tell you that we are making an animated movie, we need your help, what voice should this toaster have and children have to assign a voice and children who are learning Spanish or French as their first language from very early on began to find voices that are appropriate for the grammatical gender in their language.

If you ask people, they describe a bridge, so give me three. adjectives that describe a bridge and you could do this with bilinguals, so they do it in English and people will give you different adjectives depending on grammatical gender, so they could give more stereotypical adjectives like beautiful, elegant if feminine and strong and imposing if is male there is some evidence to suggest that hurricanes given female names these names, of course, are randomly assigned two hurricanes are more deadly because people do not evacuate when they are told to do so because they underestimate the possible restraint of these hurricanes, it's true, actually, even if you are Hurricane Katrina and some of the other denser ones on the set and you can also see this in art, then this is an effect that you can see with your own eyes when you look at a personification in art, If a painter or sculptor has decided to portray death, time, truth or justice in a work of art, how do they decide if it will be a man or a woman?

Well, it turns out that about 78% of the time you can differentiate gender and personification from gender. in the artist's native language, let me show you a couple of my favorite examples. Here is Michelangelo's time of day so you have sunrise, sunset and night, and you can see that these all agree with the grammatical genders in Italian. Another thing that language does for us is interpret and construct events in such a way that events in the world seem very complicated and even simple events are complicated and I know that sounds absurd but this is what I mean, let's take this example .

Dick Cheney went hunting a few years ago. with his friend he beat up Harry Whittington, who turns out to be a lawyer, and Cheney accidentally shoots Whittington in the face, so there are many different ways we could describe this event, but it's a very simple event, it doesn't take long. shoot someone the split second event face and it is also a simple physical event, it is not like the collapse of the global economy or global warming or any of these more complex events where many agents act overtime in many causal loops, no It's like that. It's really simple and yet we have a lot of different ways we could think about it and describe it, so this is the way European hair will describe the event that they said.

Cheney's lawyer suggests that he went out looking for lawyers and now got one that is canonically in English, you could say that Cheney shot Whittington or you could say that Whittington was shot by Cheney, which eliminates Cheney a little, it is You could just say that Whittington was shot leaving Cheney out of it, you can use more vivid verbs, so in Texas, the paper said things like Whittington were splashed pretty well, so you can spice up your description a little. This is what Cheney's interview did, where he was good at taking full responsibility for the event.

He said that ultimately I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that he fired. the round that hit Harry and you can talk about all the other conditions that exist at that time, but that's the bottom line and no, it wasn't Harry's fault, that's very kind of him, but look at that first sentence, it says that Ultimately, I'm the guy. who pulled the trigger that fired the bullet that hit Harry, so this is a split second event, but you turn it into a chain of four events, and it turns out that you are at one end of that chain of logs, but this issomething that language allows us Can I say with wander or we cured polio and that's a verb for those very complicated prolonged events or can I use four verbs to say I shot my friend in the face, in fact, every time you choose a verb you're taking a perspective on how long you're going to compact in an event what makes an event bush did it better said he heard a bird fly and he turned and pulled the trigger and saw his friend get hit that's masterful jubilation here Cheney transforms from agent to mere witness at the end of a single sentence, of course, the onion always makes the best headlines, they said, White had prior knowledge of Cheney's threat.

The August report warned Cheney determined to shoot the old man in the face. Now I'm giving you these. Obviously some of them are jokes, but just to show how many options we have in how we interpret even relatively simple events and languages ​​and not only do they allow us many of these options, but they also differ from each other in what is canonical and how it is used usually. would describe an event, so let me tell you a difference and in English we have this rather strange property in the sense that we don't clearly distinguish between things that are accidents and things that are intentional, so in both cases, if someone I know gave an good hit and he actually broke the vase unlike someone who accidentally causes a vase to break.

It's perfectly fine to say that he broke the vase. In fact, in English you can even say things like I broke my arm now in many languages. You can't say that unless you're a lunatic and you went out looking to break your arm and you succeeded because that construction of "I did something" suggests that you did it intentionally, that was your goal and that's how you would do it. Instead of saying something like the vase broke, my arm broke, it happened that the vase broke on top of me or something like that, they talked to themselves, would there be some way to distinguish grammatically that was not intentional, so Spanish is a language like this makes more of a distinction between accidents and intentional events and there are two interesting differences to note here.

One is that English does not strongly distinguish between accidents and intentional actions, but Spanish only talks about who did it when it is intentional and when it is less accidental. You're less likely to mention that someone did something, you're more likely to just talk about the result. So does that make a difference in the kinds of things people pay attention to and remember when they witness events? So we ran a little game in the lab where we showed people videos of events that were intentional or accidental, so here's an example of an intentional action, okay, sure, and here's an accidental version of that, okay. , and then after people watched a bunch of these videos, different crimes against pencils and balloons. and so on and we said okay, earlier you saw one of these guys do something with a balloon, which one of these two guys was it and half the actions were done by one and half the actions were done by the other, so this is like a police. alignment as eyewitness memory alignment can you remember who did it and what we found is that when actions are intentional everyone remembers who did it Spanish English speakers the Japanese are very good at remembering who did it in this task when the action it's accidental it's the english speakers who are the champions the english speakers are still paying close attention to who did it, they are the ones describing the action i.e. popped the balloon, broke the pencil, but if you change the question and instead You ask, do you remember? it was an accident now it's the English speakers who don't look as attractive now it's the Spanish speakers who remember if it was an accident and the English speakers because they were paying so much attention to who did it they didn't code as strongly whether or not it was an accident, so there is a trade off, there are many things we can pay attention to and what we see here is that speakers of different languages ​​witness exactly the same event but they remember different things about that event, now again I always want to ask how do we know that language is causal.

How do we know that language can create this difference in what people remember? So one way to do it is to bring in English speakers and bombard them with one type of language or another so that We bring in English speakers and bombard them with non-agent language, like the match went out, the toast burned, etc., or we give them agentic versions. , like she burned the toast, undid the necklace, etc., so these are all events that have no relation to what you are going to see in the videos so you watch the videos the same as before and again we ask you who did it the first time. time and what we find is if you just bombarded them with the paint splatter this is not agentic language, they start to pay less attention to who did it if you have bombarded them with it burned the toast, unbuttoned the necklace, they pay more attention to who did it right, then the type of language that swims around you is that of grammatical The shapes that swim around your nerd in your environment change what you pay attention to even when you are seeing new events unrelated to what you end up to listen now.

I want to shift to how we think about numbers now. The numbers are so fascinating. This is the case because we tend to think of mathematics as a universal language, very often when I teach about language and culture to my university students, I start by asking them what culture is and they give all kinds of answers and then I ask them, well, what? that? it's not culture and then they scratch their heads for a while and argue among themselves and eventually at least one group will say that mathematics is a strange culture because it's universal, you know, it's given by God or some force outside of human minds and What I always like to remind people is that the mathematical system we use now, of course, is a relatively recent human invention or discovery.

If you think about it, the decimal positional system we use didn't really take hold in Europe in the 18th century. It started earlier in India and the Arab world, but there are many other different types of number systems in the world that are not decimal or base 10 as we use them, so for example, here is a system for Papua New Guinea, it is a body. based system and its base 27, then you start counting with a finger on one hand and it goes around your body and when you get to the little finger on the other hand, that is 27 and the names of these body parts of the names of the numbers , so if you want eight potatoes, you ask for cubed potatoes, for example, now languages ​​differ in these basic systems, body is a very common source, so there are many languages ​​that use base five, base ten, base 20, you can imagine why we have five fingers, ten fingers. on your account both hands 20 if you find the toes in warm places you can see them so they are very common but you also get systems that are based 12 often because of the joints, counting the joints and the fingers, for what there are four. fingers and three joints in each one and you could use Selma's counter to have your base 12 system, base eight systems and then you have these kind of wild systems that could be base 81 and some Papua New Guinea languages, some languages ​​have binary as are their mode of calculation in them and then some languages ​​don't have any numbers, so this is a famous example from Amazon.

These are the piraha and they don't have any exact number, so there is no word like seven on the phone, of which there isn't even an exact word for one and one thing that researchers have wondered, does that make a difference in How is the piraha able to perform even basic numerical tasks? So here the researcher placed several spools of thread and asked the participant should place the same number of balloons, do the same as in the instructions and you can see that the participants have difficulties here and of course anyone can make a mistake but the types of errors and how quickly the errors grow as the numbers grow suggest that what the parihar do is not count at all, they cannot keep track of the exact numbers like we do, but rather they approximate them and when you approximate, the size of your errors increases as the size of the things you need to approximate become larger and you see this very clear signature approximation and how they do these tests now, of course, it's always really problematic to compare people from such different cultures, so the control group of the Piraha, who are hunter-gatherers.

The group on Amazon was a group of MIT college students. Now you can probably imagine a couple of reasons why MIT undergraduates might look different on a math task than anyone else you know, pick any other group of people in the world, etc. Of course, I'm being a little glib, experiments are more controlled on that, but you always want to know how much language specifically contributes to a pattern you see in cognition and one of the best examples comes from studies of deaf people who sign in Nicaragua, so these are people who live in a very numerical culture.

Well, here's a street scene from Manaus. These people write buses and use money and live in families that talk and use numbers all the time, but some of them have never done it. I learned a language that has a number system, so they are specifically deficient in this linguistic input of having number words in their vocabulary and what we find is that deaf people who sign and have not learned a set of number words there. They've never been exposed to number words in their sign, they can't do these very basic number matching tasks, as seen with the piraha, and the thing is, they know they're missing something, so they know it when they go.

They go to the store and give someone money, that person somehow magically knows how much money to give back, but they just don't know how to know, it's just this magical cognitive ability that other people have that they don't have and to me, the way Thinking about it is that I have a lot of friends who are very good at improvising music or you know, composing on the fly and I know they are good because when they do it it sounds good and if I tried it, it would sound terrible and I have no idea how they do it, so It's a magical thing to me that they just open their mouth and it sounds good and I have no idea how they do it, so that's the way I think about it. you know there's something you're missing and you just have no idea how to get into that system, in this case what they're missing is this cultural system of number words that was developed and refined over many, many generations and that now We take it completely for granted because we learned it so long ago as children that we don't remember learning it and yet it gave us entry into this whole world of numbers and mathematics and in our culture, of course, there is nothing that is Believe without mathematics.

Okay, so there's nothing in this room that was created without math and if you like puzzles, I'll show you this too at the end of the talk so you can take it home, well, you'll see it better at the End of the talk, okay, these are the things we've talked about about how people think about space, time, color and numbers. Now, of course, we all, to some extent, know that what you call something is important, because we argue about it all the time. time and often there are dire consequences for what you call someone or something, so we call people patriots or activists or terrorists.

The same group of people can be called these three different things and they will be treated very differently. Does the US government sponsor torture? or just enhanced interrogation techniques, did Bill and Monica have sex? The definition of this word was one of the turning points in the Bill Clinton impeachment case. Are we talking about lies or falsehoods and misstatements or alternative facts again? These kinds of differences are now very strong and outside of these more serious decisions, there are many decisions that we make that may be less important but yet still deal with this relationship between language and thought, so, for example , a few years ago, the California Pruning Board filed a petition.

The FDA allowed them to change the name of their product from prunes to dried plums. Now this cost them millions of dollars, why would they do such a thing? Well, prunes, the word prune lived in a bad linguistic neighborhood, so imagine that. what, what, what, what, prunes, associated with, of course, constipation in old age, you know, they bring cleansing, things that young Californians don't want to think about when they buy their snacks, but dried prunes, dried plums, they live in an excellent linguistic neighborhood, they are friends. with things like dried kiwis, dried apricots, things that you take on a hike, so they bet that if you changed the name of prunes to dried plums, which is, of course, what they are, people would be more excited tobought them and, in fact, they were very dry.

Plums started selling better than prunes, eventually they had to sell prunes and dried plums side by side because older people wanted prunes and then several years later they had to combine the packaging and now It is said that both prunes and dried plums are just It has gone through many transformations. Well, now I want to point out that we always want to ask: can language really be causal in shaping how we think? Can language really shape thought? And I just want to remind you of the ways we try. To establish a relationship, one way is to train people to speak in new ways and show them that it changes the way they think, and another way is to take away their language, so I didn't tell you about these types of studies, but you can alter people's ability to speak naturally. use language by giving them a set of words to repeat over and over, for example, and when you do that, you can disrupt many other cognitive processes and change the way people behave and the tasks we used to think we didn't perform. . linguistically, you can ask people to switch languages, so take bilinguals and test them in one language or another and show that they think differently depending on the language they are being tested in and what linguistic environment they are in. that moment to bring all this.

Together, of course, our languages ​​and cultures make us super intelligent, we inherit a lot of knowledge that has been built up over thousands of generations of our predecessors, our metaphor systems for space and time, our number systems are ways of lending attention to impartial events, these are all cognitive. tools that have been built by our predecessors over many, many generations, these are useful guides to the world, ways of compressing the infinite amount of information that you would otherwise need to figure out how to approach, so they are incredibly useful tools, but on the other hand side Cultures also reduce cognitive entropy.

What I mean by this is that we are able to think about the world and conceptualize it in many different ways, but we usually don't do all those ways correctly, we never think about how to look. We could think about things differently, we just do things the way we are used to doing them in our languages, in our cultures, once you get into one of those trenches, you don't think about getting out of the trench and seeing as. Other possibilities are the fact that there are so many languages ​​and they differ so much that this linguistic diversity is a true testament to the ingenuity in Thanks to the sophistication and flexibility of the human mind, we are able to invent not one perspective of the world, but seven thousand and many. more, because we're constantly changing language, we're inventing language, we're moving things in new directions, so I want to leave you with this thought about thinking about linguistic diversity as this aspiration to think about how you might think about things differently, what are they?

All the different things your mind can do now, of course, not every time you try to rename something, is it going to work? to have the desired effect and we can all think of cases where it completely fails, so here is an example where the US Congress decided to change the name of French fries to french fries through an official law of the Congress, this was because France would not join our Coalition of the Be willing to go to Iraq and this was our punishment for them also affected the toast to freedom, now this is not new, for example, during the First War World, things that had a German foundation name changed names, so we had Liberty cabbage, Liberty sausages and Liberty popsicles which obviously didn't stick and it's also not something specific to the United States, so for example in Iran, after the Danish newspaper published caricatures of the prophet Muhammad, they changed the name of the Danish dough to tears of the prophet Muhammad, the pizzas were called elastic breads, etc., so this is a very common technique all over the world and also not is successful everywhere it is tried and there is a very clear technical reason why they are generally words in the language that are synonyms that you can simply replace one with another our words that are interchangeable so post mail and Mail postman and postman in English you can use them in all the same contexts, so if you can simply extract a word and replace it with another word without any other changes, that suggests that these words have a very close and close meaning with their synonyms. so let's take this to its logical conclusion: we have freedom fries and toast and then freedom poodles, freedom kisses, freedom manicures, but then what should we call France, Freedomland and what should we call the French, the language of freedom?

Of course, you start by trying to say France and liberty are somehow anti sydejko, that's the point of the substitution, but what you're really doing is equating them. The logical conclusion is that France and freedom are synonymous, so I would propose that if we really want to upset the French and it seems that nationalism is in our future to use the principles of science and take the things that the French hate and call them French, for example, and ketchup could become French sauce. McDonald's would be the French café. Monogamy would be the French relationship. Disneyland would spread.

Americans would be French, the English language would be called French, etc. Thank you very much, so I promised you a puzzle to take home for homework and here is one that you can take a photo of if you want. This is from a real language that is still spoken in the world today and what you have on the left here is the given set, so those are the number words that would be used to name those particular numbers, so that is the word for five and the word for nine and so on and your job is to calculate find out what the number words are, what the numbers are that are named with those words and how you would write these numbers in this language.

I'm not going to tell you what language it is because then you can cheat, so do it. Do this with a friend and you will need a piece of paper, which is very difficult to do without a piece of paper, so enjoy it. I would like to know what you say. It's absolutely fascinating, but how does it affect the UN translator, for example? When they have to translate from one of these languages ​​to another, how can they cope? Give an accurate translation. Well, the translation problem at the UN is actually much worse than what we just described because they have to cross many languages. and they don't have pair translators for each pair, so for example the Lithuanian representative is speaking and the Greek representative is listening.

They do not have a direct translator from Lithuanian to Greek. They have to go through some other language, so there might be a Lithuanian French translator and then a French Greek translator, so when you get the message you can imagine how many ways it has changed. Of course, translators are highly trained and incredibly dedicated people, but it is impossible to achieve an exact translation. in two languages, even ones that are closely related, so many errors and many differences will necessarily be introduced and hopefully they can be resolved in discussion, but you know that communication between two people, even if they speak the same language, it still has a There are a lot of problems, so I don't know if you were married, but most married people have experienced this and one of my favorite quotes from George Bernard Shaw is that he says that the biggest problem with communication is illusion that it has happened to all of us.

We all think we've been perfectly clear and then somehow, 20 years later, you find out that you figured out how this could have been. It's a huge problem, so the question is: are there areas of universality and if so, where depending on the level they are at? which defines universality, of course, things that are found in all languages, so a basic one is that all human languages ​​must be learned by humans, so they all share this property. There is no human language that humans do not learn, they all have to be useful in some way for communication, they have to allow people to continue to exist, procreate and transmit language, so that at that level their absolute Universal are also some properties really common that languages ​​have, whether they are complete universals or not.

No, you will find them in many, many languages, for example, all the languages ​​I know distinguish up from down because all the humans I know live in places subject to gravity, so you know it's a really useful clear tool. There is asymmetry in the world and most humans pick it up and distinguish it in some way, but then once you get to things that are more abstract or further away from direct physical experience, a lot of differences can emerge and even things that are very linked. to physical experience. like a color or representations of space, humans have found different ways to conceptualize and structure them, so there are certainly strong general trends in all languages ​​that are driven by physics, physiology, human bodies are really similar in everyone, etc., but within those similarities, people still find incredible latitude to create their conceptual universe whatever and maybe the poetry that develops the brain is a wonderful question there are a little there some suggestions that reading fiction improves improve your theory of mind so theory of mind is this ability to read other people's minds and to have more intentions and think about what thinking is and could be, of course there are some types of fiction that are especially geared to that right, so if you're reading a lot of Jane Austen, it's all about thinking about what other people might think and how other people might perceive you and so it's giving you a lot of practice thinking about other people's minds; it's early days for that kind of research, but there's at least a suggestion that that generally happened the broader your set of experiences.

Whether through lived experience or reading, the more flexible and open-minded you seem to become. For example, people who have lived in various places around the world do better on creativity tests for simply being able to think outside the box. and this makes sense if you are exposed to many different ways of doing things, then you become disinhibited from thinking that there is only one way to do it the right way, just like your culture does, and instead you might be freer to Explore Other ways babies are born able to speak one language better than another. I mean, they learn one language better than another, so when babies are born, they have already experienced much of the language around them by hearing the sounds. the womb and we know this because when babies are born they respond more strongly to the sound patterns of their language compared to languages ​​that have different sound patterns, so if their language has a particular melody, they will respond to languages ​​that They have that melody stronger. that languages ​​that have other melodies, if their language makes a particular set of phonological distinctions, respond more to those than to those of other languages, so except in very rare cases there is no information, for example, if a baby, die, of course, they have I didn't have that experience, but except in those rare cases, the inference when they are born are no longer prelinguistic, they have already been language, right?, they have been experiencing language even before they can open their eyes and they see the world and that early experience already conditions them to the sounds and patterns of their language which they begin to learn very early, but in principle, of course, a baby born in any culture can learn the language of that culture, some Languages ​​take longer to learn. perfect than others, so the Slavic languages, for example, are terrible, they have all this extra marketing and it takes children until they are 12 or 13 to really start having an adult level of proficiency with case marking, marking gender, aspect marking and all the different things. having to do with Slavic verbs and other languages, children will reach adult-like proficiency sooner, so depending on the specific complexities of your language, it may take longer to achieve slight adult proficiency.

Do you think the different ways people use the language now? texting is changing the way they think which is a wonderful question so you know people are always using language in new ways. Correct language has never been static, it is a living thing and the only thing that has been common throughout history is that older people complain about how young they are. people are killing the language and soon there will be no more language left because of the children these days and people are worried that thelanguage being destroyed by all kinds of things, so there were serious arguments that the invention of the printing press was going to destroy the language the English language the Norman conquest was going to destroy the language teenagers of all generations were always on the verge of destroying the English language the language continues to change and evolve and that is its nature it is a living being it is a living being that we create and whether it is through technology or being exposed to new experiences, that will always happen so yes, people definitely It's changing language, some of that is driven by technology, but this is nothing new that we don't know exactly, so I haven't done an experiment. find out, but the way I would start asking that question is by saying: is there something systematically structurally different about the way you use language and text compared to spoken language?

Is there any pattern that you would specifically predict because if it's just a short form of language it may not, it may not lead to interesting differences, so I would like to look at what is structurally different when texting as opposed to speaking. Do you have a more research-informed opinion or not about whether the relative dominance of the culture, whether it has had an impact on the way people with a Nam For those for whom English is a second, third, or fourth language, well, it has impacted the way they conceive of the things they think. that's a great question, so we've done work like this looking at bilinguals learning English as their second language, looking at how they change the way they think in their native language and even the way they speak their native language and also the way bilinguals change the way they don't change the way they speak english but they change english through the way they speak because of the things they bring from their first language so let me give you an example of the first type that we observe in Indonesian speakers who I have learned English and Indonesian is one of those languages ​​that does not tense English verbs, of course, do Indonesian speakers complain about learning English and say why Are you so obsessed with when things happen and how you have to do them? changing these verbs and in general anything that you don't mark in your language and then suddenly you have to start doing it, it's really annoying, whether it's grammatical gender or anything else, you just think why are these people so obsessed with that.

So this is their reaction to each one, but then when we look at how they speak Indonesian, they actually start to put a lot more information about the weather into their Indonesian, so the way they speak their native language changes based on desire. and we also see the effects. in the opposite direction, so sometimes people come from a language that makes more distinctions and then try to bring those distinctions into English and speak a sort of richer version of English, which is why we often think that speakers of a second language they speak some kind of reduced English or maybe I like versions of the language, but sometimes it turns out that they speak a fancier version, so, for example, I said that Russian has this horrible system with verbs where you have to mark all kinds of things and English is not so strict about that. requirements and so when we get our Russian-English bilinguals to speak in English, we find that they will do all these really sophisticated constructions that native English speakers don't do because Russian speakers are trying to preserve the distinctions of Russian, so that English speakers might be happy to say they drank the wine. list if all the wine is gone.

We Russian speakers will say that she was drugged with all the wine or that she was drinking one. I'll try. I'll try to say something more elegant to preserve this important aggression distinction so that the influences go both ways. Can you share any corollaries of your research with cinematic language like ASL signing or dance? Yes, so sign languages, of course, are natural human languages. and I didn't, I only mentioned signs when I talked about numbers, but there are people who study different sign languages ​​all over the world, of course, there are many different ones and they are not mutually understandable with each other and there are all kinds of cognitive effects that the people have studied since they are Chinese, for example, your ability to pay attention and allocate attention to visual space improves because you have to coordinate, you have to look at the person's face and also look at their hands, so you get a lot of information. practice doing it so that when you learn to sign, your ability to visually distribute attention improves, and of course all these structural properties of signing are interesting too.

I want to give you an example about kind of an interesting difference in, maybe, the translation between a spoken language and a sign language, so a lot of science, even in very developed sign languages, is still somewhat iconic, for example, aside from eating and American Sign Language is like that, I may be getting the details a little wrong, but it's something. So, it's kind of a sign of ingestion, and of course we use the word eat in English and expand it in all sorts of metaphorical ways so that we can say that the acid went through the shoe right where it's not really ingestion anymore, it's more well a disintegration and therefore in American Sign Language you cannot use this sign to say that the acid ate the shoe and instead it translates more as this sign, which is a kind of bite, for which has to enter into some other physical sign. form, so just one example of where you have to resolve a translation in a particular way, has to do with modality because the sign is so iconic that it just carries a lot of additional meaning of this additional meaning of ingestion, you have to do something else to these metaphorical extensions please join me in thinking