Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert lamp and I'm Christian Seger,
Speaker 1: and we're picking up where we left off in the
Speaker 1: last episode talking about farerald children, wild children, the acquisition
Speaker 1: of language, and what language really is. Yeah, if you
Speaker 1: didn't listen to the first episode yet, I suggests that
Speaker 1: you go back and check it out. We talked about,
Speaker 1: you know, what exactly a feral child is, the differences
Speaker 1: between wild children and abused children throughout history, but how
Speaker 1: they show similar you know, cognitive difficulties, and then we
Speaker 1: gave examples of both you know, mythical stories of ferald children,
Speaker 1: but then also documented cases of feral children throughout history,
Speaker 1: leading us into this section where we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about the brain, language, child development, how it all works,
Speaker 1: and why feral children have been so important to a
Speaker 1: lot of intellectuals throughout history. Yeah, I think it's really
Speaker 1: important to it to realize what's at stake with language
Speaker 1: and uh in any lapse in the ability to acquire language. Um,
Speaker 1: because of course it's as we've discussed already, it's more
Speaker 1: than a means of communicating ideas to one another. It's
Speaker 1: it's an operating system for the brain, a key aspect
Speaker 1: of what makes us human. Uh. And we can better
Speaker 1: glimpse some of the wonders this involves. But and we
Speaker 1: can better go in some of the wonders that are
Speaker 1: involved in this by looking at the subtle differences among
Speaker 1: the languages, differences that impact the way that we process
Speaker 1: the passage of time, the nature of reality. Absolutely. Uh.
Speaker 1: If you're a regular Radio Lab listener, and I know
Speaker 1: a number of our listeners also listen to that show,
Speaker 1: then you've probably heard why Isn't the Sky blue? Uh?
Speaker 1: An episode in which linguist Guy Deuscher discusses the case
Speaker 1: for a gray sky world, you know, asking that question,
Speaker 1: do we only come to see the sky as blue?
Speaker 1: And of course blue is a quite rare color in
Speaker 1: the natural world, and we see very few examples of
Speaker 1: a really truly blue organisms. So do we see the
Speaker 1: sky is blue only because we use our language to
Speaker 1: describe it as such? Or is it truly blue? And
Speaker 1: he makes a compelling case that it's not really blue,
Speaker 1: it's more of a gray, and just by using the
Speaker 1: words to describe it, thus we see it does we
Speaker 1: change it. Yeah, Well, I was talking to you a
Speaker 1: little bit about this before we recorded the podcast. I
Speaker 1: grew up overseas, and when I was a teenager, I
Speaker 1: learned Mandarin. I've since forgotten a huge chunk of it. Um,
Speaker 1: but my experience as a kid growing up knowing English
Speaker 1: and then also learning Mandarin side by side was that
Speaker 1: it very much. There's a very different thought process that
Speaker 1: goes on with Mandarin thinking compared to English thinking. And
Speaker 1: I think that this is a perfect example. I don't
Speaker 1: know that necessarily that that that, um, those who speak
Speaker 1: Mandarin see the sky any differently than we do, but
Speaker 1: I'm sure that there are certain cultural aspects that go
Speaker 1: along with that difference in language, that difference in understanding. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a compelling argument to be made. I think that
Speaker 1: the language isn't just about communicating, but it's also it's
Speaker 1: about how we use the brain. It's how we Again,
Speaker 1: it comes back to that that software hardware analogy. That
Speaker 1: language is the way in which we use our brains
Speaker 1: to think. Yeah and yeah, especially like you hear, often
Speaker 1: people who are learning a second language sort of describe
Speaker 1: feel that they are fluent in the language itself. Once
Speaker 1: they've started thinking in that language, right, once they've been
Speaker 1: exposed to it enough and immersed in it that they're
Speaker 1: thinking thoughts in that language. M one one easy area
Speaker 1: to look at here again just to really, you know,
Speaker 1: bring up, bring home what's at stake with language and
Speaker 1: languge acquisition and how important it is. UM. Language is
Speaker 1: different wildly in the way that they encode time, and
Speaker 1: this has an effect on the manner in which we
Speaker 1: process and think about the passage of time, and really
Speaker 1: on the very nature of history, be it larger history
Speaker 1: or personal history. UM. In two thousand thirteen, Yale Universities
Speaker 1: M Keith chin He presented an hypothesis that languages UH
Speaker 1: that grammatically associate the future and the present tend to
Speaker 1: foster future oriented behavior and UH. I found this to
Speaker 1: be a rather rather rather interesting theory UH and involves
Speaker 1: what linguists call future time reference or f TR. And
Speaker 1: it turns out there's quite a lot of variety. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know from my experience studying communications in school that
Speaker 1: there is a lot of attention paid to how we
Speaker 1: understand time and different cultures, regardless of language, even UM
Speaker 1: in in defining how those cultures exist together and apart
Speaker 1: and how cross cultural communication works. So you may be
Speaker 1: speaking the same language, we could all be speaking English,
Speaker 1: but we'd have a different understanding of what near means
Speaker 1: or future means, past means. Like European tongues alone tend
Speaker 1: to have a range from a tendency to rarely distinguish
Speaker 1: present and future time, such as Finnish apparently too languages
Speaker 1: like French which have uh separate and obligatory future forms
Speaker 1: of verbs. So you have weak FDR again future time
Speaker 1: reference and strong FTR languages. And according to Chin, weak
Speaker 1: FTR speakers may perceive future events as less distance less
Speaker 1: distant um. The example that he ends up using is
Speaker 1: that if a German speaker tells you that it's going
Speaker 1: to rain tomorrow, essentially he or she is saying tomorrow
Speaker 1: it is raining, as opposed to just in English, where
Speaker 1: we say tomorrow it will rain. So in a sense,
Speaker 1: the future is already happening to the German language speaker. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and in effect you're again you get cross cultural communication
Speaker 1: confusion from this, right, like like what is the definition
Speaker 1: of raining? Or when? Linguistic distinctions may also lead to
Speaker 1: more precise beliefs UH and studies have found that languages
Speaker 1: with more precise basic color terms caused the speaker to
Speaker 1: hold more precise color beliefs. So languages tend to process
Speaker 1: anywhere from from two to eleven basic colors. UM. Black, white,
Speaker 1: and red are pretty much a given, but several languages
Speaker 1: refer to yellow, green, and blue with one basic color term. Uh.
Speaker 1: In many languages lack a basic word for purple, pink, orange,
Speaker 1: or gray. I wonder how much that has to do
Speaker 1: with different types of color blindness throughout cultures. I know
Speaker 1: that we did an episode on color blindness and how
Speaker 1: it works for brain Stuff video show here at how
Speaker 1: Stuff works, and there's different types of color blindness. I
Speaker 1: learned from that. You know, you can have I think
Speaker 1: it's like red, green, color blind this, and then there's
Speaker 1: other distinctions. So I wonder if that has something to
Speaker 1: do with it. It might there. Um, I don't believe
Speaker 1: this is actually the same Radio Lab episode referred to earlier.
Speaker 1: They talked about the Odyssey, about some of the colors
Speaker 1: that are lacking from descriptions in Homer's the Odyssey, meaning
Speaker 1: some to theorize that that interesting. Um, Now with the
Speaker 1: blue example we were talking, I mean the color example
Speaker 1: we were talking about earlier when in linguistics, Um, the
Speaker 1: take home here seems to be that it means that
Speaker 1: language influences our ability to comprehend the world around us,
Speaker 1: to organize it, and to define us. And one curious
Speaker 1: example here is that in Russian there's a strong distinction
Speaker 1: between light blue, which is glow boy, I believe, in
Speaker 1: dark blue, which is sin in sinny. I'm saying that wrong,
Speaker 1: but sinny, I believe. And Russian speakers therefore tend to
Speaker 1: perform better in tests distinguishing different shades of blue. So
Speaker 1: the language is more specific, and therefore they're understanding the
Speaker 1: ability to to see it is more specific as well.
Speaker 1: I wonder if you can then see a difference in uh,
Speaker 1: the aesthetics or possibly like graphic design of those different
Speaker 1: cultures based on like, you know, like, for instance, if
Speaker 1: blues or so important in Russia, I wonder if you
Speaker 1: tend to see a lot more mixtures of different shades
Speaker 1: or hues of blue. Uh, it's like that, Um, oh God,
Speaker 1: what is it? What is it? Alaskan Inuit that they
Speaker 1: have different words right, Um, when you go to like
Speaker 1: home depot or whatever to buy the paints for your home,
Speaker 1: there's like, you know, twenty different types of white basically
Speaker 1: or off white or egg shell or whatever. They they
Speaker 1: have all kinds of bizarre names that they come up
Speaker 1: with for them having done graphic design before. I mean,
Speaker 1: I used to reference the Pantone color booklet all the time.
Speaker 1: There's like a five hundred different colors in there alone.
Speaker 1: It definitely makes me want to pay more to the
Speaker 1: next time I'm looking at any kind of Russian visual media,
Speaker 1: be it a movie or art, to see if if
Speaker 1: they're more blue, is they're more blue or maybe I
Speaker 1: won't even be able to appreciate it as well as
Speaker 1: a Russian language speaker based on my ability to distinguish
Speaker 1: the blue. Yeah, absolutely, So okay, let's use that as
Speaker 1: a basis. Then to step back for a second and
Speaker 1: bring this back to feral children. Okay, So consider like
Speaker 1: that we're using this example of that Russian has so
Speaker 1: many distinctions between blues that we as English speakers may
Speaker 1: not even be able to comprehend them. Right, That's a simple,
Speaker 1: small thing that is probably small enough that we could
Speaker 1: get past it an intercultural communication. If you're a feral child, however,
Speaker 1: and you haven't learned any language, and you haven't been
Speaker 1: able to comprehend any of these things. You have no
Speaker 1: comprehension of blue at all, what blue is, what color is? Even? Right? Then,
Speaker 1: imagine how difficult it is to process cognitively the world
Speaker 1: around you. Like you said before, language how we organize
Speaker 1: and define the world around us. Our culture is how
Speaker 1: we understand the world in a way. The world is
Speaker 1: so complex and there's so much coming at us at
Speaker 1: all times, right sensory wise, that we need that we
Speaker 1: need to be able to define that and put it
Speaker 1: into boxes or else we go crazy. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: we'll come back to this one in a minute. But
Speaker 1: just imagine perceiving the world around you and not knowing
Speaker 1: there are names for things, like not knowing the names
Speaker 1: of anything. You know. It's at times we kind of
Speaker 1: is language bearing individuals. We kind of like to experiment
Speaker 1: with that. We kind of like to occasionally like steer
Speaker 1: out in the forest and not categorize everything. And there
Speaker 1: could be something refreshing in that. But imagine, and it's
Speaker 1: so difficult to do it. Imagine just not knowing the
Speaker 1: names of anything you're looking at. I would even go
Speaker 1: a step further. I I would hypothesize that it's possible
Speaker 1: that some feral children possibly don't know the difference between
Speaker 1: themselves and the external world. Imagine that. Yeah, because language
Speaker 1: enables us to play with all these different concepts, and
Speaker 1: any of them are crucial concepts to knowing what we
Speaker 1: are on a very basic existential level. Yeah. H Now
Speaker 1: another example that comes up, and perhaps you can speak
Speaker 1: to this one a little bit. Since um, we've given
Speaker 1: your background with the Mandarin, but the concept of time
Speaker 1: in Chinese languages, not not only Mandarin, but other other
Speaker 1: dialects as well. I understand, um and their use of
Speaker 1: their or their their the lack of tents, right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I remember that that was a difficult part in learning
Speaker 1: Mandarin when I because I came to it when I
Speaker 1: was probably fourteen years old. Um. And I think like
Speaker 1: the optimal time for learning a new language is something
Speaker 1: like before your ten or something like that. Um, but yeah,
Speaker 1: I do remember this. It's it's significantly different. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: I've seen some linguists argue that it may contribute to
Speaker 1: the importance of ancestors and kept Chinese culture because it
Speaker 1: it on on on one level, it means that your
Speaker 1: ancestors are still in the present because of the tents
Speaker 1: that is used to refer to them again in the
Speaker 1: same way that for the German it's already raining even
Speaker 1: though it's raining tomorrow. For the Chinese language speaker, the
Speaker 1: the ancestor is not dead. The ancestor is still alive
Speaker 1: in the past. Yeah, that's interesting. I never considered that.
Speaker 1: I guess when I was living overseas and speaking Chinese,
Speaker 1: I wasn't. I wasn't interacting with religious culture all that much,
Speaker 1: especially in terms of like how they regarded their ancestors.
Speaker 1: It was more like, you know, I was at the
Speaker 1: level where they were teaching us, like here's how to
Speaker 1: buy things in a star or something like that. But um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that that has some plausibility to it. Now
Speaker 1: here's another aspect of language that that I tend not
Speaker 1: to think think about all that much either of But
Speaker 1: it was explored in a piece for Ian magazine titled
Speaker 1: The Sun Does Not Rise by Andrew Crummy, and the
Speaker 1: pointed out that we have a lot of magical notions
Speaker 1: about how the world works, uh, and they're essentially fossilized
Speaker 1: within our own language. Explained further. Yes, So, um, I'll
Speaker 1: just read a quote from this article. But because I
Speaker 1: believe this, uh, this strives at home the principle of
Speaker 1: eternal folly offers a somewhat different picture. In place of
Speaker 1: history scene is a progression of steps on a ladder.
Speaker 1: We could instead imagine something more stratified, rather like the
Speaker 1: escarpments of the Wield of Kent that Charles Darwin wrote
Speaker 1: about so eloquently. We envisage a cliff face exposed by erosion.
Speaker 1: Our own age is the topmost layer, but presented to
Speaker 1: us are the remains of every preceding age, and we
Speaker 1: are at liberty to pluck out buried fossils if we
Speaker 1: choose so that it mainly brings up two keys amples. Here,
Speaker 1: we still say that the sun rises, though of course
Speaker 1: it doesn't rise. The earth rotates. But we're well, we're
Speaker 1: linguistically shackled to this outdated model of solar mechanics. Likewise,
Speaker 1: do you still might someone say talk about how they
Speaker 1: cast their gaze over something or or some various uh
Speaker 1: you know, turn of phrase that means the same thing,
Speaker 1: when in fact we know that rays enter our eyes.
Speaker 1: There's not like this magic laser beam that shoots of
Speaker 1: cyclops wise and bounces off the thing we're looking to
Speaker 1: add and then come comes back. Yeah, that's interesting. I'd
Speaker 1: take this a step further. I wonder if he's slought
Speaker 1: about this before. I saw a presentation on UM software
Speaker 1: and desktop design before, and basically the person presenting was like,
Speaker 1: why do we still pretend that our computers are desks.
Speaker 1: You've got folders and trash cans and and there's even
Speaker 1: pencils and note pads and all of that, right, Like,
Speaker 1: we're acting like it's a desk. They're all metaphors. And
Speaker 1: we're so far along now that and so used to
Speaker 1: digital technology that shouldn't we be using something else other
Speaker 1: than these tangible metaphors. Yeah. I think that's a great example,
Speaker 1: and it does drive down to the fact that, you know,
Speaker 1: the language we used to describe something, even even though
Speaker 1: our our understanding of that thing has updated significantly, we're
Speaker 1: still describing it in an all outdated way, and in
Speaker 1: a sense, we're processing in it in that way too.
Speaker 1: So even if you say the sun rises, like you
Speaker 1: still kind of you kind of have this this dual
Speaker 1: belief system in play, where on one level it is
Speaker 1: literally rising, and then while you still know in the
Speaker 1: back of your head that there's a more complicated orbital
Speaker 1: situation going on there. It's it's This is another perfect
Speaker 1: example of culture making the world easier to understand for
Speaker 1: the human mind. Right, Like, if you try to comprehend
Speaker 1: what's actually going on with the sun on the scale
Speaker 1: that it's going on with, you can't do it. Our
Speaker 1: human brain just can't do it processing all those things
Speaker 1: that are happening with it and our relative we were
Speaker 1: talking earlier about, uh, your son and and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: understanding as a child the differences in space and time. Right,
Speaker 1: imagine trying to understand your human existence on this huge
Speaker 1: rock in relationship to this even huger ball of fire
Speaker 1: and how they're rotating all around in this vast space. Right,
Speaker 1: we can't do it. So it's much easier for us
Speaker 1: to say it rises. Yeah. And I found myself in
Speaker 1: the exact situation with him, um, months and months ago
Speaker 1: and maybe a year ago. I'm standing on the beach,
Speaker 1: you know, where you can clearly see the sun come
Speaker 1: up and then later you can see it go down,
Speaker 1: and he's asking, how what's going on? How is it working?
Speaker 1: And I want to be able to explain something more
Speaker 1: nuanced to him, but I end up saying, well, you know,
Speaker 1: the sun comes up and then it goes down, and
Speaker 1: then it goes under. Yeah, And that's like you have
Speaker 1: to have a starting point exactly. Yeah. And and then
Speaker 1: from there on out maybe you know you can you
Speaker 1: can as he acquired more language skills and syntax to
Speaker 1: be able to you know, use it to form new
Speaker 1: ideas for new words, transform his understanding than you can.
Speaker 1: And I say that thing I said earlier, Daddy was lying,
Speaker 1: U men to protect you from the crushing insignificance human
Speaker 1: life faces when we stare at the sun and understand
Speaker 1: it the cosmic unimportant. So obviously language does does more
Speaker 1: than that. Which a couple of examples here just to
Speaker 1: show you a little more the little complicated nuances that
Speaker 1: are going on under the surface. Um, but you know
Speaker 1: everything I mean, human culture, technology, the the advance of science,
Speaker 1: like all of these things stem from language. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: at the end of the day, the language and culture
Speaker 1: also they not only define what we know, but they
Speaker 1: define how we know what we know. And I know
Speaker 1: that's this is way too deep of a topic for
Speaker 1: us to go down into now. But like ideas of
Speaker 1: post structuralism and language and uh postmodernism combined together, you know, basically.
Speaker 1: And I think it was like the late seventies, especially
Speaker 1: in France, that these ideas were coming about. That just
Speaker 1: our very understanding of knowledge itself is dependent on language
Speaker 1: and dependent on that is constructing limits into our understanding again,
Speaker 1: or else we'd go mad. All Right, we're gonna take
Speaker 1: a quick break and when we come back, we're gonna
Speaker 1: look at a couple of other examples that they give
Speaker 1: us a some some more to chew on here with language,
Speaker 1: or we're gonna look at at at a very primitive
Speaker 1: language that lacks abstraction, fiction and myth um and uh
Speaker 1: in a possible view at what adult life might consist
Speaker 1: of without language. All Right, we're back. You know. I
Speaker 1: read a book a few years back, China m Elvil's novels.
Speaker 1: I have read this bookuse a huge China miel fan,
Speaker 1: and that's a great book that I was really impressed
Speaker 1: with it. It was very very serious for the most part,
Speaker 1: but but it explored some linguistic themes. Yeah, he's a
Speaker 1: really smart science fiction fantasy writer in how he plays
Speaker 1: around with how language defines things for us. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: a very meta book. Yeah, that one in particular dealt
Speaker 1: with interactions between humans and an alien species with severe
Speaker 1: cognitive and linguistic limitations on its ability to lie. So
Speaker 1: it's it's kind of like that Ricky Gervais movie about
Speaker 1: the invention of lying um, except played seriously in a
Speaker 1: sci fi environment where you know, what, what does it
Speaker 1: mean when you know you're a bill reality to communicate
Speaker 1: with this other being? Uh, And it's the ability to
Speaker 1: process the world with its language, like it doesn't understand
Speaker 1: the concept of lying. There's some other sci fi ideas
Speaker 1: that are thrown around and there about like there's one
Speaker 1: alien species that's just mentioned that it like communicates through vomiting,
Speaker 1: I think, And and there's a you know, one of
Speaker 1: the central species in the book. For humans to communicate,
Speaker 1: you have to have like two individuals that are kind
Speaker 1: of like nearly sinked so that they can seeing a
Speaker 1: chorus of their communication in a way that the alien
Speaker 1: can understand it. But when I read it, it got
Speaker 1: me to wondering, you know, is it possible within human
Speaker 1: language that there there are any human language systems where
Speaker 1: lying doesn't exist? And as far as I can tell,
Speaker 1: the lying is pretty much everywhere in some form. But
Speaker 1: there is this interesting tongue known as Paraha, uh that
Speaker 1: the Faraha people of the Amazon speak, and it provides
Speaker 1: uh some interesting food for thought on you know, on
Speaker 1: the what what is it like to have a language
Speaker 1: that is a little more limited. A lot of this
Speaker 1: comes from a two thousand seven New Yorker article titled
Speaker 1: the interpreter Um. We can just do a quick rundown
Speaker 1: of some of the more astounding attributes of the language. Okay,
Speaker 1: so in this definition of Paraha, one of the first
Speaker 1: things that we know is that it's based on merely
Speaker 1: eight consonants and three vowels. There's a complex array of tones, stresses,
Speaker 1: and syllable lengths, and the speakers can drop the vowels
Speaker 1: and consonants and instead use singing, humming, and whistling. That's interesting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that reminds there's a recent thing that came out about
Speaker 1: whistling Turkish. Yeah, there's like a version of Turkish that
Speaker 1: is whistled for long distance communication. But it's it's different
Speaker 1: enough from Turkish to wherever you're a Turkish language speaking,
Speaker 1: even a native Turkish speaker, if you're unfamiliar with whistled Turkish.
Speaker 1: You're not going to understand it. Yeah, huh, okay uh.
Speaker 1: And this paraha also contains no numbers or a system
Speaker 1: of counting. So imagine what we were talking about earlier
Speaker 1: with regards to time. Probably impacts their culture significantly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they used the simplest pronoun inventory known and they have
Speaker 1: a lack of any relative tenses or any individual or
Speaker 1: collective memory more than two generations past. So again, look
Speaker 1: at that. That's just alone. How not using numbers can
Speaker 1: impact you. Yeah, they have that. They can't understand anything
Speaker 1: that they didn't actually experience, probably right. Yeah, they have
Speaker 1: no drawings or art, they lack they lack color words,
Speaker 1: and this one's interesting. They lack creation, myths and fiction,
Speaker 1: which is kind of close to the inability to lie. Mhmm. Interesting.
Speaker 1: So in the in this this particular New Yorker piece,
Speaker 1: they they draw out that you know that there's an
Speaker 1: isolated people and they within a hunter gatherer world of
Speaker 1: the here and now. So it's a it's a world
Speaker 1: without abstraction. If they're talking about something, or if they're
Speaker 1: paying it much heed, then that thing is right in
Speaker 1: front of them to see, to smell, to taste, to touch,
Speaker 1: you know, there's there's no hey guys, they just saw
Speaker 1: five flowers. Uh, they must have been created by a god,
Speaker 1: and so they merely say, hey, check out these flowers. Here.
Speaker 1: They are right before us. There's no worrying about where
Speaker 1: they are in time and space because they are right here.
Speaker 1: So I'm really curious. Did this piece in The New
Speaker 1: Yorker get into how the interaction with the Western world
Speaker 1: affected them or their language or their culture, Like just
Speaker 1: by being there the journalist was influencing their language. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean they I don't think they got into it
Speaker 1: much in that piece. Uh, but I mean they're gonna
Speaker 1: be some concepts that they just don't get as much,
Speaker 1: um like uh, Like here's an example. They mentioned that
Speaker 1: for the Paraha people, when someone walks around have been
Speaker 1: in the in the river. That person has not simply
Speaker 1: gone away, but they have gone of existence. So so
Speaker 1: I mean their understanding of the world, their linguistic processing
Speaker 1: of the world is so different from you know, from
Speaker 1: English speakers, that there are certain concepts are gonna be
Speaker 1: difficult to pass back and forth. They're gonna be concepts
Speaker 1: are gonna be difficult for them to assimilate. So again,
Speaker 1: like let's let's think about this in terms of the
Speaker 1: feral children that we were talking about before. Right, Uh,
Speaker 1: this sounds completely alien to me, trying to think about
Speaker 1: living a world, living in a world where there's no fiction.
Speaker 1: I don't know that I could do that, But imagine
Speaker 1: not even not even having words to understand anything, not
Speaker 1: even having the capacity to understand where you begin and
Speaker 1: the rest of the world ends. Yeah, it's uh, it
Speaker 1: reminds me a bit too. Um. We talked about innumate
Speaker 1: language systems a bit earlier about words for snow. I
Speaker 1: remember reading about Innuit people's that that referred to distance
Speaker 1: in terms of time, right, Yeah, like if you saw it,
Speaker 1: you can see tremendous distance in this particular area, if
Speaker 1: I remember correctly, its long, flat areas. But it's about
Speaker 1: like to look through a telescope is to look into
Speaker 1: the future, which is kind of act that, especially because
Speaker 1: like I think this is a fairly American concept that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we use miles to measure long distances, but for the
Speaker 1: most part, when we're talking about miles, we're talking about
Speaker 1: how far you can travel or how long you can
Speaker 1: travel in that period of time. Right, So, rather when
Speaker 1: somebody says to me, how far away is Woodstock, Georgia.
Speaker 1: I say forty minutes. Yeah, yeah, rather that I think,
Speaker 1: I think about things like that for the most part. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: you know another thing that this makes me think about
Speaker 1: is animals. Right, So, like we're getting to the core
Speaker 1: of this argument about you know, feral children. What's the
Speaker 1: different between a human being and an animal. Like we
Speaker 1: said earlier, animals aren't technically learning language. Some of them
Speaker 1: understand simply use My dog understands when I say sit,
Speaker 1: it sits right. Um, that doesn't mean that he has
Speaker 1: the capacity for language. But at the same time, my
Speaker 1: dog has an understanding of the world that is more
Speaker 1: complex than it sounds like these some of these feral
Speaker 1: children have. Yeah, because at least the dog has had
Speaker 1: the chance to come of age in an environment, you know,
Speaker 1: like and it's I don't know if your dog, your
Speaker 1: dog gets to go outside, he does any socializes right,
Speaker 1: not only with uh, my family and other human beings,
Speaker 1: but with other dogs too, So that this is a
Speaker 1: key component here too for the feral children. Right, it's
Speaker 1: not just about language, it's about the socialization part. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're not getting too so they're having extremely limited socialization
Speaker 1: with any humans and then virtually no socialization with children
Speaker 1: their own age. Like, what would happen to an animal
Speaker 1: if you took it away from its its a family,
Speaker 1: put it in a room and didn't interact with it
Speaker 1: for four years. Well, you're talking about an inside cat.
Speaker 1: They go crazy and they're Unfortunately I have to interact
Speaker 1: with my inside cat. Yeah. Yeah, she basically just tries
Speaker 1: to writ my face open. Yeah. And you know, we
Speaker 1: wonder why they're crazy the outside and we do that
Speaker 1: because we love them so much. But it's a twisted
Speaker 1: relationship we have for babies. Um. Now there's a there's
Speaker 1: another interesting case that that has been been studied that
Speaker 1: that answers some of our questions about about about what
Speaker 1: it is like to live without language. And this comes
Speaker 1: from author Susan Shaler's work Uh, dealing with a deaf
Speaker 1: Mexican immigrant who grew up in a house with hearing
Speaker 1: parents who could not teach him sign language m H
Speaker 1: and uh. Again, she discusses this in her book, and
Speaker 1: I think this has been She's also made the rounds
Speaker 1: on radio shows in the past, so she was on
Speaker 1: radio labs. She may have been on this American life.
Speaker 1: So a number of you are probably familiar with this case.
Speaker 1: But the man in question, who she referred to as
Speaker 1: ed Alfonso, was he wasn't avoid of human intelligence obviously, uh,
Speaker 1: and he developed an interesting survival tactic. The one that
Speaker 1: that proved problematic when she was trying to teach him,
Speaker 1: and that was mimicry. Like he would would see people talking,
Speaker 1: but he couldn't hear the sound. He didn't even know
Speaker 1: what sound was, so he would mimic the movements of
Speaker 1: the mouth. So in a lot of ways, that's like
Speaker 1: when when they try to teach some animals language, like chimpanzees,
Speaker 1: even though I'm assuming these chimpanzees aren't definitely they're teaching them,
Speaker 1: but there that's how they start off by mimicking what
Speaker 1: they're what they're taught. Interesting, yeah, and so that proved
Speaker 1: problematic when she was trying to teach him sign language.
Speaker 1: But and it was long, frustrating work, but she finally
Speaker 1: achieved a break through when she was able to teach
Speaker 1: him that things have names like that was the first
Speaker 1: big breakthrough that he learned that all these things I'm
Speaker 1: seeing in the world around me they have names, they
Speaker 1: have there's a symbolic UH system that I can refer
Speaker 1: to to say what that is? Yeah, and I'm assuming
Speaker 1: he was of adult age by this time. Yea, yeah,
Speaker 1: so he uh, you know, he end up you know,
Speaker 1: acquiring a sign language made it a huge difference to him.
Speaker 1: But she continued to always have trouble like trying to
Speaker 1: draw out from him what it was like to live
Speaker 1: without language because he was you know, he had a
Speaker 1: lot of shame about it. He referred to it as
Speaker 1: a dark time. Uh, and now he was out of
Speaker 1: that darkness and didn't want to dwell on it. But
Speaker 1: think about it too, we don't have the capacity in
Speaker 1: written into our language in order to be able to
Speaker 1: describe what life is like without language. So even once
Speaker 1: you've taught it to him, he's he would have difficulty
Speaker 1: explaining it. Yeah, that's the thing, like how do you
Speaker 1: use language to describe the complete absence of language? So um,
Speaker 1: this gets into all of this ultimately leads to two
Speaker 1: models that we have for for the for how language
Speaker 1: and cognition uh deal with each other. There's the language
Speaker 1: first model and this essentially this model opposits that cognition
Speaker 1: emerges from language, and that without language, our cognitive development
Speaker 1: is severely inhibited. Um. It also posits that people's cognitive
Speaker 1: abilities are tied to its language, and this is the
Speaker 1: window model that we were sort of talking about her. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I feel like this is the model that pretty much
Speaker 1: everything we've been talking about lines of with the thought
Speaker 1: first argument suggests that language merely expresses thought and is
Speaker 1: not a preret prerequisite. But this would require a language
Speaker 1: of thought to underlie language itself. So this would kind
Speaker 1: of tie it with Chomsky's earlier arguments back in the
Speaker 1: seventy you have a universal language, Yeah, but this would
Speaker 1: involve their being like essentially a universal sub language that
Speaker 1: exists beneath the language, and then our acquisition of language
Speaker 1: is based on this. But again that that doesn't really
Speaker 1: line up with with the cases we've been looking at,
Speaker 1: perhaps in terms of evidence. Yeah, this all right, Maybe
Speaker 1: I'm going down the wrong way with us, but bear
Speaker 1: with me. Language of thought, So that sounds like telepathy
Speaker 1: to me. So like if you never experience if you
Speaker 1: were part of an alien species that didn't have mouths,
Speaker 1: but you were telepathic and you could speak to one
Speaker 1: another that way. Yeah, it makes me think of a
Speaker 1: fiction really, like how where you'll have a book where
Speaker 1: you'll have the main character thinks eloquently, but you know,
Speaker 1: talks poorly, you know, but which works within a you know,
Speaker 1: within a within literature. I'm not so sure that it
Speaker 1: works as a model for human cognition. Yeah, or didn't
Speaker 1: write exactly that in real life? Are people with limited
Speaker 1: language capacity? Do they still have complex thought processes or
Speaker 1: vice versa? Yeah? And then what is it like to
Speaker 1: have a complex thought without language? Yeah, totally, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think that I'm inclined to lean towards the language first models.
Speaker 1: Then Yeah, same here for now, just based on the evidence.
Speaker 1: But I think it would be intriguing. You know, Chomsky's
Speaker 1: idea is interesting, interesting enough that it lasted for four decades. Uh,
Speaker 1: but it's just it hasn't been proven. Yeah, I would
Speaker 1: be interested to see a thought first argument with with
Speaker 1: a lot of data to back it up, like to
Speaker 1: see what what what? What data are they looking at?
Speaker 1: Clearly not not the cases that that we looked at
Speaker 1: in this episode so much, but but maybe there is
Speaker 1: a more compelling case to be made when you look
Speaker 1: at their body of evidence, and certainly in the case
Speaker 1: of feral children, the thought first argument doesn't seem to
Speaker 1: play out right, all right, So there you have it. Well, language, Uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's power, it's importance, and some of the nuances
Speaker 1: across our our very human languages that that I think
Speaker 1: helps to to drive home just how powerful and essential
Speaker 1: language is. Yeah. Absolutely, And you know, like I've said
Speaker 1: in in other episodes that we've done, you know, we're
Speaker 1: not exactly experts on this. I did go to school
Speaker 1: for communication studies, but I was not specifically focused on
Speaker 1: language development, which many people do focus in, uh and
Speaker 1: spend their entire careers in. So I would if you're
Speaker 1: one of those people out there and you have opinions
Speaker 1: on this, or you've got something that you can share
Speaker 1: with us that we could maybe you know, add to
Speaker 1: a listener mail episode down the road, or maybe correct
Speaker 1: something that we've said here today, I'd love to hear
Speaker 1: from you. So you can get us in contact with
Speaker 1: us on social media. We're on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler,
Speaker 1: and on all of those platforms we are blow the mind. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and certainly, um, if there we'd love to cover more
Speaker 1: linguistic topics. So if there are other you know, the
Speaker 1: other related material you want to bring to light get
Speaker 1: in touch with us, and in the meantime, go to
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