her mind well to discuss that i'm now joined by letter but i did speak associate professor of cognitive science at the university of california san diego professor bard it's a pleasure and honor to talk to thank you very much for your time thanks so much for having me now i know that you have long been studying the relationship between the mind language and the world around us and i think you come to a very humbling conclusions that as much as real like to see ourselves as the masters of our thought and our boards it works in the opposite direction to our language shape our experience in some very profound ways how does that work well of course we all have many years of experience speaking a language and we absorb so many habits and so many important structures from the language each human language is exquisitely structured there are about 7000 languages and all of that experience of speaking a language hearing a language around you trains your mind to focus on some things and not others

there's always potentially an infinite set of things you could notice about the world you could potentially try to remember about the world and language streamlet and to think about only some of those things to focus on only those things that the people before us who built the language over many generations those things they thought were most important those things got built into the language and so now those are the things that we tend to focus on in the structures that we tend to conform and the heat works also in very subtle ways we do not necessarily we kind of appropriate to ourselves to our own free will but without necessarily realizing that there are forces that imposing certain structures on ourselves you know we all take the language that we speak for granted it's like the air that we breathe we don't notice it and in fact most of us believe that we simply perceive reality the way that it is in fact we know through many years of psychological experiments so that's very far from the truth we don't see things just the way that they are instead the world. and that we the internal world we live in is highly constructed

by the structures of our brains but also by the structures of our languages and cultures that tell us how to put things together you often talk about the symbiotic and lead forcing relationship it's been language and culture and it's very hard for me personally to resist thinking about the relationship in cheek in that terms enough to sort of struggling with it for some time i wonder if it's actually a fitting metaphor or not in terms of what comes 1st but the terms of how the to encapsulate reproduce one another yeah so i think of language as a part of culture language is a really good way to make a part of culture very long term and universally distributed so if i make something like a magical engender a part of the language well all speakers of that language are going to have to use that structure it's not going to be optional if you're speaking russian you can't just speak russian and not use grammatical gender no one's going to recognize you

as a real russian speakers and so it becomes something that's then universally distributed through the culture and the languages can lose genders can add genders that process is going to have to take a very long time whereas other cultural practices can come and go much more fluidly and may only affect some portions of the body but how far do you extrapolate from that relationship the fact that english and to some extent russian and both added to their quick to assign blame or responsibility does it have anything to do with the curse aeration rates in the united states and then russia being among the world's highest it's really hard to draw a straight line from language to a statistic like that because there are so many other factors that also all play and so we would have to do a very careful study trying to a lot is that even possible do you think you can design a study like this to prove that connection the reason it would be hard to do in the real world is because if we're going. by country there aren't actually that many

countries in the world and so you very quickly run out of statistical power that's a technical answer to your question but you could do expect some smaller scale experiments where you ask people to make judgements about. blame and punishment when they're seeking one language or another or when they've been exposed to more attentive language or less attentive language and see if they make different judgments we use the example of justin timberlake and janet jackson having a wardrobe malfunction at the super bowl if we say timberlake rips the costume. people are much more likely to blame timberlake and they also want to charge him 53 percent more in fines than if we say the costume ripped even though they're watching the same video now you mention. language to universally distribute certain practices in english clearly the lingo of all. times. do we understand are there any indications of why it has been able to gain

such a status isn't because it's relatively easy to learn compared to other languages are out there perhaps alba cracked or contributing to that probably economic factors are the most important where english speaking countries are driving a lot of economic growth and a lot of innovation that spreads to the rest of the world a lot of places want to then speak english so they can participate in the trade or participate in the tourist industry whatever whatever it is that makes sense for them but you know lots of other languages have held sway at other times so often we look at a particular historic moment and say oh english has taken over soon everyone would just speak english the amount of time that english has been dominant is actually a very tiny portion of historical time compared to say the greek empire or the roman empire obviously of all other languages english comes with its own. cultural

baggage and i wonder as a both escolar and a speaker of english is there anything in it that. you either don't like or perhaps find to imposing. well you know in any language. there are going to be some things that are required and then they're going to be some things that are optional and. for example right now there is a big debate in english a badge interpreting ours right so. 3rd person singular pronouns he and she shared gendered and some people are arguing that we shouldn't have or. we should introduce neutral pronouns or use that singular they. i think that a nice design for a language in that situation would be to make gender optional so that you can market when it's necessary a relevant and not market when it's not relevant so it would be interesting to see what english would look like if you could get rid of gender marking on 3rd person

printer it's the same way that english already does it mark gender on 1st person pronouns like i and we or 2nd person is like you said do the same thing for a 3rd person pronouns but that make it optional to be able to market when you really want this is actually a very interesting subject because. there are a lot of efforts of the we policing the language that english language their political correctness but actually law just plating it for example in canada there where there was a controversy a few years ago about monday being certain pronouns why do you think. controversial category for english speaking world because arguably this is you know a part of the world where gender equality is at its highest. well i think one reason is that we tend to believe that the structures of our language reflect reality and. so if in your language there are 2 categories he and she male and

female most people then believe that those are the 2 relevant categories and everyone should be divided into those. but if people come around and say hey i don't feel like i fit into either category i want to be some other category that creates a lot of conflict interpersonal conflict in the moment social conflict and if the issue is simply linguistic reference that's a very simple thing to fix you just have it a neutral neutral way to what you say it's a simple thing to fix and yes i heard you say that close close words are particular difficulty is super imposed the we also i think similar cases within the one they're trying to introduce the the neutral pronoun. so in the swedish case that they introduce 10 as this singular 3rd person present it's neither male or female and there actually were some recent studies showing that if you remind

people of the use of pen in makes it easier for them to imagine people who are not men in positions of power so for example if you give them a neutral story like this person is considering running for public office government office tell me more about this person the likelihood that they'll imagine a woman goes up if they've heard the use of the word hen recently and so it's said jess that that kind of study suggests that introducing a neutral option kind of opens people opens people up to think about things that are beyond absurd it is not exactly a country where women cannot progress big career letter i mean in terms of their representative moments of women the positions i think it's pretty good when i was a matter of degree and even in really good situations one can still do that i mean that leads me to kind of wonder if english is increasingly becoming a vehicle for progressivist. politics because when i was studying it and i was

studying it as an adult than ever studying it together with turkish with turkish you just learn you know the cabbie lariam you know grammar but the thing which you have to learn a lot of political concepts like gender equality sexism male hierarchy or or a male dominance whatever i mean all those ideas that i near and dear to you the american left is not necessarily universal is it even possible these days to separate english as a language of international communication from english the language of them american political worldview you know languages and living things for there are always changing to reflect the needs of the people who are crafting them and so when you're in the middle of one of those changes it always feels uncomfortable because it's a negotiation and one group of people might be pushing for one thing in the group of people are pushing for another thing but english hasn't been english in its current form for a very long so it's the most normal thing in fact in the history of any language

that it should change and should continue to change in english english has been very very dynamic and so. i hope that as a new living object it continues to reflect the values that people want the things that stick around in the language and the things that people find useful but then those can still continue to change and so if a change in pronouns happens now and then in 200 years people decide actually one a different set of pronouns all together there are some new set of things we discover and decide about types of humans you can build those into but it's one thing when it happens naturally as a matter of linguistic evolution and it's another thing when you try to mandate it's the law actually i mean in this obvious history in the early soviet history we have some examples of that and it wasn't very effective do you general believe in forcing source will change through manipulating or mandating changes in the language. i think it's extremely unlikely that

a change would stick on less people the people who actually use the language find it useful or helpful right so lots of things can be mandated but they don't actually get used at everyday life and history is full of examples like that where there some change that's forced from on high of some decision that's made and it just doesn't stick and it doesn't actually get used by people in real conversation or people if you do use it it's all in front of it only ironically right and so the things that will actually stick around language ultimately are things that people. are communicating that they want to communicate to professor brady if we have to take a very short break now but we'll be back in just a few moments. as a lot of the areas economy where china has caught up wars are past us you know the mobile payments market 50 times the size of the u.s.

or over here still writing checks our banking system is not innovated 5 g. we've kind of recently walking up the last couple years and go wow we don't even have a company that can make 5 years it's been a win win for china and it's been a lose lose for the us. time after time gold parishioners repeat the same mantra sustainability it's very important it's accelerate the transition to sustainable prize board sustainability . more equitable and sustainable world. they claim their production is completely harmless. because. companies want us to feel good about buying their products while the damage is being done far away this is something else this must be done even and i'm. going to do. so going to.

welcome back to worlds apart with a lot of what i did ski associate professor of called media science at the university of california san diego professor burgess getto that you're very passionate advocate of linguistic and cultural diversity as well as multilingual is mezzeh way all experiencing live. to the bouts of your ability how many languages were enough for you personally to make got transition from what you call and i release them to a relative. that's where the definitely made that transition and i think it's you know it's hard to it's hard to get away from naive realism i grew up speaking russian as my native language and then i had to learn english from my family

immigrated to the u.s. and i speak some terrible french and some very poor indonesian and little bits and pieces you are a very humble person as well well into the indonesians because they're very kind to so they said they say that my intonation and that's good but french speakers are less kind so. i'm speaking about your russian i heard you say during one talk. when your family moved to the united states you refused to speak russian for one year because you wanted to dust for it to fit in did you have a chance to overcome the teenage rebellion and did you have a chance to appreciate or sort of remember in russian they as you grew older i definitely learned to appreciate speaking russian later in life certainly when a immigrated i felt like i wanted to be like an american and a. it was important for myself identity to be able to communicate fluidly or even just to be able to make a joke to it feels. when you're in

a new place where you can't express yourself it feels like you're trapped inside your head that there is like a person in there and no one can see that person and so the it the idea of being able to express myself food was very important but then once i felt like i could do that i appreciated the whole while having a rich they're rich fresh and language and all of those references available to me for sure to a 14 year the russian language may sound very harsh are once heard actress mila kunis say that when she has a conversation with her dad over the phone her american friends think that they're fighting even though they may be exchanging pleasantries or speaking to each other very nicely and. i think spanish maybe talian may have the same impression is it clear why certain languages tend to appear mole emotive than

others. while some languages sound harsher because they have a lot of fricative consonants like if you have a lot of sounds in your language people tend to associate that with harshness and some languages sound very emotional because they use tone as part of the word meaning so for example mandarin or cantonese if you hear people speaking that sometimes it sounds very emotional but it's just because you use rising and falling tones to change the meaning of the words it's not actually meant to communicate emotion so we tend to take certain sounds as needing things even though they don't that's what i think content wise russians are far more. comfortable with a good heated argument even the altercation than some of our british or german friends do you think the political tension that russia sometimes. passive with the west may have anything to do with the fact that rio is simply enjoying a good fight much more than they do. the russians definitely. being direct in that

directness can be and argument as well yeah and the question is whether that. argument becomes emotional or personal or whether it's just the joy of the argument . certainly in an english speaking context i had to learn for example to start my answers to even simple questions with i think or it might be and i had to learn to do that even in math class where to be more indirect to soften it so you have to hedge it so if someone says what is 2 plus 5 it's more polite to say i think it says that. than to say it's 7 is just to say it 7 sounds rude. and that takes a little while to learn that it seemed to me like it's not the obvious what the answer is and i don't need to say i think it's 7 it just is 7 in my personal life i have to interact with a lot of muslim people from various cultural backgrounds and they all have this common denominator of mailing so they're very non-committal in. trying to arrange

them things it always makes it hard to bear that the joy and mounts or do you think it's. more a cultural denominator or is it something. langridge superimposes on them sometimes those things are flexions of the world that you live in right so if you live in a world that's very predictable then you could feel comfortable making promises about the future but if you yourself live in the world that's not predictable and people around you are not reliable in it all kinds of events can occur then only a fool would be willing to promise things far in the future right so think about. the american context it's possible to go and get a loan for your house that it's a 50 year loan now anyone who's willing to give you a 50 year loan believes that the economy will be stable enough in his 2 years that the money that they've loaned you now will be worth a reasonable amount and there are lots of places in the world that would be an

absurd thing to do so how reliable you yourself can be has to depend on how reliable the world is around to use the use of and shall i think often is a reflection of living in a world that isn't stable itself it's very interesting i heard you say once western cultures have a stronger by for progress that's partially a function of how they conceptualize time time not only of moving but moving in a positive direction do you think this may be something that contributes to how they engage with the rest of the world being more certain of being perhaps more expansion is both linguistically we talked about english being so widespread but bowl also another demain sic anomic political etc it's definitely normal in english to think that you're the agent in your life and that the way that anything is going to happen is that you have to make it happen and and that's your role is to try to

make things happen and to make change and to make progress and that's often how we define what is good is how much change and progress has been made as opposed to for example how much things have stayed the same or how relative. the calm things have been or how much you preserved. so that is a set of cultural norms and it's reflected in some structure in the language it's definitely the way that we have been defining good and in cultural. time for for quite a while in the west i also heard you say that. you wanted your new acquaintances of your russian heritage fairly early in your conversation otherwise they would be suspicious has it always been the case or is it a relatively new phenomenon for your following in elections and russia gave gumbo you know it's it's a longstanding thing the way i speak english now it sounds like an american english

speaker to most people i have a slight accent that most people don't hear it. and so if someone has met me and known me for a couple weeks and they then later learn that i spent the 1st 12 years living in in the soviet union they feel like they're something like secretive or strange about me it's almost like i'm putting on an american accent even though this is really the only way i know how to speak english i don't have another way of doing it do you think that filling the suspicion that was there even before the 2016 election got amplified following. the election of donald trump. i don't feel that definitely russia has more on the minds of people now than it was before that and. i think it's more that people very strongly associate the way that you use language with your identity so you expect very quickly it can make lots and lots of decision

social decisions about someone by the way that they talk and so we expect to be able to tell lots and lots of things about people in their identity by listening to them talk and so it's shocking when the language that someone is speaking in the way they're using language that somehow seems at discontinuity with their identity then you feel like well what else is this person hiding how can they sound so i frantically american when in fact it's a lie now since you mentioned sophisticated kettler let me ask you a question about donald trump as the linguistic phenomenon. many people would argue the particular is somewhat simple and even primitive i know a lot of english learners who feel proud of the all progress when they hear it's the american presence of the yep that kind of the matter of speech has proved very effective with with his own base how do you explain that perhaps the alec one as

a prerequisite for american politicians has been overrated well i think different politicians appeal to different groups of people right so the eloquent politicians appeal to a different segment of the populace really i mean he didn't face the stronger competition the part of the population that was very excited for example for the eloquence of barack obama are not the same people that are excited for the ineloquent so donald trump bret those are probably 2 separate groups of people so different different people and different things but. he he's a master of using very simple emotionally loaded language that is creates very quick sound bites for people to hold onto and he's also a master was above deniability where we can say something and claim to both mean it and not mean it at the same time so he can say we're going to build a wall and he could say well it's a metaphorical wall and really i'm just talking about border security but the next

press he'll say it'll be made of cement and obese 30 feet tall and it'll have eaten his deliveries are you accusing him of these linguistic manipulations and do you think that's just the humor not being very articulate i think we expect different things from different speakers and he has created a persona where he's allowed a lot more than lots of other people so if your identity as a speaker is that you are you have 100 percent for acidy that you are or you're very technical or you're going to be correct in the details then when you make a little mistakes people are going to hold you to that standard that you say. for yourself but that's not the standard that he set for himself and so he has asked us to engage with him as this much more loose speaker and so that gives him incredible latitude to say things that he that can claim he both meant and didn't mean and i think he's not alone i think of it that may go beyond some because there was an interesting study by grammar only recently which found that the use of last complex language correlated with higher poll numbers at least for the republicans and i

think that's a very interesting phenomenon because we're kind of used to politicians trying to appear smarter than they are but. for the politicians to appear less linguistically sophisticated than they are in them putting it in terms is pretty unusual do you think that's a big challenge to look dumb or the you are in reality i mean you can use simple language and say really smart things it's a simple language the idea i think is to say things that people can understand and importantly will remember most people who are thinking about politics aren't thinking about it most of the day they're thinking about their life and the things they need to do to feed their families and do their job and all that and so those little sound bites that they get have to be both understandable and them are a ball and so whichever way you can achieve that either through simple language or invented language or language that really connects with people's lives in whatever way i think that's going to be affected. finally

a lot of people are blaming twitter on both the success of trump and the emergence of this hashtag culture when you are on the obligation to compress very complex ideas into a couple of a few characters and that. not only steam with your to be more eloquent but i think it also develops a certain appetite among the public for very simplistic processing of ideas are you concerned about that or is that a natural phenomena. well i think it's wonderful that lots of people are participating in the public square and are able to. state their opinions and participating. in the conversation i think it does change very much the nature of the conversation went so everybody did and so decontextualized where you don't know who you're talking to you don't know where they're coming from and also they end in emitting a lot of traction leaves a lot of room for aggression aggressive behavior that you know you feel like you

can act like an shark because people won't know who you are and they won't punish you so i think they're both pluses and minuses with any platform of any technology it's a matter of how we use it professor but it's been a great pleasure talking to you thank you very much for thank you so much for having encouraged our viewers to keep this conversation going in our social media pages and hope to see same place same time here in a while it's a part of. looking

forward to. this is what happens to veterans in britain. as a report. there's a lot of the here is the economy where china has caught up or surpassed you know the mobile payments markets 50 times the size of the u.s. we're over here still writing checks our banking system is not innovated. kind of recently was going up the last couple years ago we don't even have a company that can make 5 g. equipment it's been a win win for china it's been a lose lose for the u.s. .

the united states of fascinate the top iranian revolutionary guard commander in a drone strike in iraq iranian supremely is warning of a harsh retaliation against the u.s. . the turkish parliament decision to deploy troops in libya faces strong criticism towards israel greece and cyprus fear it will escalate the conflict in the region. is continuing our rewind of 2900 key chapters we remember the tragedy which struck not too dark i think in part.

a warm welcome you watching r.t. international with me the kid aaron.