Does language affect the way you think? | Daily Digest 17/9/19

hello and welcome to another kangaroo English daily digest my name is Christian and today is Tuesday the best day of the week now in the previous daily digest I talked a lot about the philosophy of language and about the way that humans and animals communicate and also maybe some alien and strange languages and I'm going to continue to talk a little bit about that today but with a more kind of practical focus now yesterday I kind of focused on how languages and non-human languages like animal languages can use sound in different ways and I got a lot of messages from people saying well you know sound is not the only way that we can communicate and those people are absolutely right I mean look at the way that I'm communicating with you right now using gestures and facial expressions all of those things are completely nonverbal communication and they're really important and you know scientists have done some thinking about how aliens might communicate in other kind of nonverbal ways like they could communicate using gestures right or they could communicate using sound that we cannot even perceive like ultrasonic or subsonic sound they could communicate using a light like ultraviolet light that we cannot even perceive and there are other possibilities of ways of communication like maybe emitting chemicals that we cannot even comprehend and it's possible that if an alien you know an extraterrestrial er the alien came to earth that we wouldn't be able to communicate with them because we can't even perceive their output it's beyond human comprehension but one kind of important nonverbal type of communication that we have here on earth of course the sign language and sign languages spoken by thousands hundreds of thousands millions of people all over the world and it's a very rich and you know really interesting communication system that's capable of producing all of the richness of spoken language and I have this really super interesting paper here language without speech segregating distinct circuits in the human brain okay and this was the question the question of whether language is processed independently of speech however is still heavily discussed but what they showed in this paper is that when people use and comprehend sign language it lights up exactly the same parts of the brain as spoken language and again this is more evidence that the form of communication is not important for the brain right whether you're telling me you know that you love me using sign language or whether you're telling me you love me it doesn't make any difference my brain doesn't care I was watching an interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger yesterday and in the interview they asked him should you use dumbbells or tall bells right so dumbbells are those traditional kind of like a weights you know with the round things on the end you know right and a kettlebell is like a big ball with a handle right and so he asked him should should people use dumbbells or kettlebells and his answer was it doesn't make any difference because the muscle doesn't see what you're holding in your hand and it seems obvious right it's such a an obvious answer and it's the same with language your brain doesn't see the language your brain sees the message sees the concepts right and this is evidence of that our brains process language without speech and here's some more evidence okay from neuroscience the representation of semantic information across human cerebral cortex during listening versus reading is invariant to stimulus modality basically listen to this here we show that although the representation of semantic information in the human brain is quite complex the semantic representations evoked by listening versus reading are almost identical so basically your brain doesn't care whether you're reading something or listening to it it's all the same to your brain it just wants the message it's more evidence that a really important part of learning a language is focusing on having something to say focusing on you know having a message ideas concepts now I want to sort of just go just go a little bit back a little bit back and let's talk a bit more about this idea that your language is a part of your culture okay that culture and language are strongly connected because in the previous digest I said that two important things when you're learning a language one is you need to focus on having ideas and you know and thinking and you also need to focus on culture because culture will really help you to learn a language and I want to talk a little bit more about that okay because there was this really famous study that was never fully published okay bye-bye [Music] bored its key and and her colleagues okay and what they did was they took German speakers and Spanish speakers and they created a list of words that were feminine and masculine in Spanish and feminine and masculine in German so you know English is a genderless language we don't have gendered nouns like for me as a native English speaker this is a pen it's not ell pen or lap n it's not masculine or feminine okay it's just a pen something important to notice right is that there's this idea right this idea that there's a strong connection between masculine and feminine language and masculine and feminine feminine human gender as in you know the reason that that things in in German are masculine or feminine is because that reflects its kind of human experience but that's not actually true the grammatical gender is not related to biological gender gender can exist in languages in lots of different ways you can have masculine and feminine and also Newton no gender like in German you can have an animate and inanimate gendered language where the things you're talking about depends on whether the thing is alive or dead and lots of other different ways that you can gender language okay it's not about biology but it does raise a question it raises an interesting question and this is the question that Bora did she and her colleagues tried to answer the question was if I'm a Spanish person and you know this object is feminine in the language do I subconsciously think of it as feminine in reality and what about this if this is a masculine in my language a masculine thing do I think about it as kind of having masculine qualities right so this is what they did listen to this they where is it okay so they created a list of 24 object names that had opposite grammatical genders in Spanish and German so for example the pen was German in the pen was masculine in German but feminine and Spanish and the telephone was Massif feminine in German and masculine they what opposite genders right and then they asked a group of native Spanish speakers and native German speakers to write down the first three adjectives that came to mind so you know I could say right here's this pen write down the first three adjectives that you think of go here's a telephone write down the first three adjectives you think of god and then they wanted to know would they write down masculine or feminine adjectives and listen to this um as predicted Spanish and German speakers generated adjectives that were rated more masculine for items whose names were ethically masculine in the native language then for items whose names are grammatically feminine for example what does it say here um for the German word key which is masculine in German they wrote hard heavy jagged metal serrated and useful right whereas in Spanish where the key is feminine they wrote golden intricate little lovely shiny and tiny right fascinating fascinating stuff blows your mind right but here's the thing okay two things the first thing is that this study was never fully published and the second thing is that this this this group here and micchan marin shift key and an atoll Stefanovich they tried to replicate the experiment in two ways and they found no correlation between grammatical gender and and and this this biological gender they couldn't replicate the experiment and this is interesting for a couple of reasons now when I read you the characteristics when I said that that a you know a key is hard and heavy and jagged apparently those are masculine qualities whereas golden and intricate and little lovely a feminine qualities well says who and this is where culture and language and the question of learning language comes into interplay okay because the idea that men are hard and heavy well that's a cultural thing and the idea that you know females are intricate and little well again they are cultural constructs there are other languages in the world where women would be the hard and the heavy ones and the men would be the little intricate golden lovely things think about it think about why men are hard it's a product of our culture why are women golden products of our culture so really in a way the experiment is kind of meaningless because it has no objective reference right and this brings us to ask the question okay so why do we need to to learn culture with language because you could go and study English and never watch an English television program never read an English book never travel to England or any other english-speaking country you could never have any culture why should we do it why is it necessary to incorporate culture into language learning and to kind of answer this question I'm going to use two examples and one of them is the rest of our eyes now Rastafari are an extremely interesting group of people in my humble opinion really interesting and one of the reasons they're interesting is because they have a special way of speaking it's a kind of modified version of English called I Arak also called live elect dread talk or I talk okay and so it's the kind of modified version of English and one of the really interesting modifications is this so instead of saying me they always say I so you know that in English I is the subject pronoun and me is the object pronoun like for example you know I gave the book to him right I gave the book to him he gave the book to me but a Rastafarian Rastafari or Rastafarian would not ever say me and the reason is isn't to this me is felt to turn the person into an object whereas I emphasizes the subjectivity of the individual so basically they have eliminated the word me from English grammar because they do not want to be objectified so they say he gave I the book and this this also they they they have a phrase called ini ini is a complex term referring to the oneness of God and every human being so I know it's like you're sort of this phrase may be a word that that unites you with the entire universe now let's think about the possible effect that this could have on your perception of the world if you never say me maybe it could have no effect maybe the effect would be completely null right but maybe not right I mean this idea this deeply embedded idea that you are not an object that you are I you're a subject that you are at one with the universe and that becomes part of the way that you speak it's a powerful idea that could change the way that you view the world and you will never be fluent in Eric you will never understand the language the point of view the perspective of a Rastafarian without understanding what it means to never say me and finally I want to talk about something a lot more practical and this is a study which came out on July the 1st this year ok language influences mass opinion towards gender and LGBT equality okay so you know that discrimination against LGBT people and non basically gender gender inequality is a big issue right now in society and these scientists they they proved that by using gender-neutral language it affects the way that people treat LGBT people and you know people who are gender fluid or non-binary whatever okay and you will find this if you think about it you know you it's it's obvious right like you know the way that in the workplace for example it's not acceptable to use sexist language you know a very small change for example is the way that in English we had mr. and mrs. and Miss mrs. and Miss were to you know indicate married and unmarried women well now in 2019 you know you you aren't defined by your marriage status we have MS and that little change affected the way that we think so maybe we will never communicate with aliens or understand what what it's like to think like an alien but small language changes can have a huge effect on Christians this kangaroo English I'll see you in class

Channel: Canguro English

Views: 29,281

Keywords: learning english, learn english, english teacher, english grammar, grammar, esl, linguistics, does language affect thought?, does language affect the way you think?, language and culture, lera boroditsky, sign language, reading or listening to learn a language, can you think without language?, how to get fluent in english, canguro english, kangaroo english, canguru english

Id: cP9k81C3QO0

Length: 19min 58sec (1198 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 17 2019