23 hours with a welcome to sophie shevardnadze. language is what makes us human unique. so what's behind one of our species? most incredible inventions, and how is it changing with technology? well, ask robert byrd of a professor of computational linguistics, computer science and engineering at mit. robert berwick, professor off computational linguistics, computer science and engineering at mit. it's really great to have you with us today, professor. well, going great, great to be here. hey, so i mean, look at us,

we're like 7000000000 people and we speak $7000.00 languages. we need language for communication, but is language in that sense kind of preventing communication rather than facilitating it. i mean, since every language cost to some sort of a private club that's more or less outsiders. right. right. that's always been one conception of language, is that collectively that people that speak a language, even a very it's a little bit from person to person. you can think of as a kind of cultural artifact that's being created by the people or last week that way. of course, the way we want to study language might differ from that because language can be used for lots of things. it can be used for communication about it can also be used for miscommunication as well as we've seen in the current election, not only just just here in the united states, but lots of other places too. so there's this aspect of language about what's

knowledge of language that's inside your head, that you actually that every human being shares. but then there's also a separate nation about language, about how do you put it to what use do you put language? and those are 2 different things to different ways of looking at language. so, if linguists can now think about the at the lucian of languages like, what is language or where is the language of all the ng? i mean, is it for them being divided into many different ones or will, would just all speak at rahman tongue one day, sooner rather than later. right. when i say, i don't think i will arrive at some kind of limbo where there's just essentially one language used by everyone. i think there you have to distinguish between, again 2 fundamental ways of looking at the evolution of language. so one way to think of it can, you can think of the evolution of, well, what was the initial origin of language. you know how you said thousands of years

ago. and then there's the business about ad a language is change over generational time from one generation to the next. and that there finer level we see that languages do actually change. but it depends a upon the number of people that are speaking them. and if there's a law and out of the group of people that speak a particular dialect or language, then by large that survives and that's subject to historical forces and other factors. so in fact, there's some, there's some places where people try to revive things like the scottish dialect or you weave we actually revived some of the native american languages to an extent where even though they were lost, there was actually a project here in near where i am to revive one of them in the southern part of massachusetts. when i was least a little bit successful,

scientists say that at least one language is dying out perfect per week. and that means that nearly half of the languages we speak will be gone within the next century, wiser. devers, that are reducing so dramatically. well, i think there's been speculation about that. i think a lot of that is to use it to the, to the internet and the fact that people use languages like english or other common languages in the view. and they tend to wash out these smaller dialects. and if you get down to a smaller size, then that language will just drop out. and if you don't have someone who speaks it to your kids, then you can lose it. and that's a concern. that's a concern that a lot of the nerds we wish have. and there are, in fact, efforts by the societies of language,

like the linguistics society of america has one and in canada and other places to actually try to preserve some of these more minor you know, minor languages where there's not a lot of people, not a lot of speakers for them, but you're right, that is something to be concerned about. because once you lose that language game, it's unless or some concerted effort to try to revive it. you'll just like animal species or plan species, you might lose them forever. so that's a concern. neural into nearing is already making it possible to send signals from the brain to external devices like robot islands. and actually also saying that one day will i be able to communicate directly brain to brain without actually using speech or writing. will we already own the language for that? well, that's a terrific question because actually what that brings into focus is this difference

between the external aspect of language, the fact that we can either speak it or if you're signing language use here, you can use manual gestures for example. so there's that aspect of language, but there's also an aspect of language that to do with it's, it's, it's use inside your brain as a kind of inner thought. we all have the sense that we're talking to ourselves. that might be more prevalent in some people than others, but i think when you begin to reflect on it, a lot of your, your own internal communication is in fact inner thought in that sense. and that's not speech. it seems to us like speech, but you can actually show that it's not. and it looks like in that sense that language is a kind of inner mental tool that we use for pulling together many of our thoughts and ideas and making them coherent people. and then experiments

about that to actually see that language. internal language serves as a kind of sort of universal, you know, again like a lingua franca, a universal system for pulling together all the other things that are going on with your sensory and brain activity. so you're constantly gashly getting information about, you know, when you're looking at an object, you get, you know, what that color of the object is and where it is. so we know their particular areas in the brain that tell us what and where things are like the collar where it is. there's a kind of geometrics on billing that we have. it's built into us. and it turns out you can actually show that it's language that pulls those things together. so there's different components of your brain can talk to each other. so language in

that sense is actually important internally. and i don't think that's going to be sort of criticized by these kinds of abilities, these kinds of neural beliefs that say, oh, by sending a little electrical signal i.q. that i make inside my brain. i can now turn the lights are off the lights. i don't think it's going to be so easily replaced. but i still wonder with think without language, i mean toddlers are people who only speak sign language while at once. do they thinking well at that again, it's a really wonderful question. because as far as we know, so language like sign language, the people that grow up, kids are grown ups, you know, only using sign language saying just the way ordinary people think. i mean, the way they might express themselves can vary. so very famous experiment that was done years ago by lyle and lightman and barbara landau. they did the

following day. they, if you ask an ordinary, if you blindfold like a normal child and you tell the child to look up, you know, go like this makes sense, right? if you take a blind child, ok and say you take a blind child in a blindfold them and you say look up, they go up, they raise their, you start to probe with their fingers, which is what a blind child who did. and i said it's very interesting. they were different mode ality different way of expressing the same thing, they just today, different way. but inside their heads, as far as the men in landau could make out their thinking is just exactly the same . so we think what that means is that inside us, well we have our inner thoughts are in fact nearing language like,

although it's certainly true that there's other kinds of thinking like literal thanking and the things that, you know, a painter or a titian might do that you know, lie off one side of what one language strictly looks like as might. those might all be connected up with language very tightly. does the language speak influenced by thing? came along, for instance, the english language like some more rigid ward order than russian. right. does that straight the way as far as we know, external part might bury? so russia might have them are, you know, more flexible word order or not. their languages like this, or famous australian language, while bery, where the word order is completely free. so even freer than latin. so, you know,

i can juggle the words in almost any word or, and yet, it turns out the internal thought process sees that we hear as far as we can gauge, that looks invariant that looks like it's the same from person to person. nowadays, of course there's a lot of, there's little variation, there's some variation. there's certainly personal individual variation. and we can't exactly tell that. but so far as we can make out, the internal part soft text, which is her what she wants. and that's what you want. so it's almost like, you know, when it, you know, in the us when they used to make all sorts of cars lined up on a certain type, the engine and the inside robbie the same and then they would just stick different fenders and different things on the outside to look a lot different, but sort of the inside machinery where i'll be the same. no,

not everyone who studies language shares that view, but that's certainly a view that i hold and other people who have looked at this sort of inner structure of the way that language interfaces. other aspects over thinking friends are going to take a short break right now. when we're back, we'll continue talking to robert professor of linguistics, computer science and engineering at mit, talking about how language is evolving. stay with us on election night. you may know whether the margin for the winner is so large that it is impossible for the defeated candidate to catch up. so there may still be

10000 votes to count, but the margin is 80000 votes and it doesn't matter if all 10000 votes went for the defeated candidate, they cannot possibly catch up and that's where we are today. joe biden's margin is so large, all of the states are being contested, that even though some other states have not finished counting, we still don't know who won. and joe biden won a majority of the electoral college votes. as a financial survival guide. stacey, let's learn. let's say i'm not so i get angry. some banks have to fight wall street spot. thank you for taking the story. that's right.

will sleep. we are sleep w. . sure. i can bench that would have been a promotion by you to go with us because all of this to do with it would seem to be some of these come home and use the 20th century. was thinking of revolution, the great depression and world war the 21st century, real mental illness, my words, psychometrist. the only question. it is a fact and

we're back with robert byrd professor of computational linguistics, computer science and engineering at mit, talking about how language evolves. fessor said that the more language a person speaks more languages, a person though, knows so many times he's a man. is there a limit? i love that quote of him. is there a limit in the human brain to how many languages one can speak? you know, we and that's again, a funny question to think about. we had some sort of natural experiment

that we were lucky enough to actually look at people who know many different languages and it doesn't say much as any real bound. there probably is because there's some limit on the number of words you can actually serve to keep separate and compartmentalize. but there's a very famous example of a linguist who passed away about 15, well, i guess about 20 years ago now, who was there mit in? his name is ken arrow and he was a person who never lost the ability to learn language. that is what we know is that around schubert, any. and sometime in some extent after that, there's something that goes on in the brain. you remember? you probably remember puberty at the time when the brain either matures or, and it's yours depending on your point of view as to whether you're a parent or not. but we know that there are certain things that happen so that the

brain actually becomes less plastic. and you, sir, you lose this ability to learn language as if it's your native language. but there are a few people. there are very rare cases where that doesn't happen. and one of these people was kenny hare and he realized this 1st when he grew up in arizona, in the united states, actually new mexico is parents sent them to a cowboy camp for the summer one summer. and his roommate, i was a navajo kid and can hail learned navajo within a few weeks. and it's a tremendously difficult language to understand, to learn. you may be familiar with the fact that the navajo language was used during world war 2. yeah, japanese as a current that they couldn't break it, but it was easy present here. and yet he gets back to school. he is about 12 or 13 at the time. he learned polish russian, german, french boom, boom, boom, boom,

boom, boom, boom. and his french teacher said, doesn't that just make you more confused? and he said now it just keeps getting easier and easier. and, and i was actually doing was lucky enough to see this in person because i actually, this is about 25 years ago. just want down the stairs. there is a flight of stairs, about 7 flights of stairs in at m.i.t. . and he was just met miskito, native american indian and from nicaragua just started talking to him. and by the time he got down to the bottom of the stairs here, centrally was fluent and that language in the sense that he could speak it perfectly. can someone explain? i am not him, i don't mean we don't understand this process. we don't understand how he was able to do this so well, but it was, if he was actually just that, you know, child,

they can just and so we're just, you know, i mean, we're talking really about prodigies are like out of the ordinary thing. that's really late there. he was deliberately for the most telling record. right. but another part of us is there like a limit to how many languages one can really speak. i don't think so in the sense that we know of even from people who aren't. so bonce like that, like ken hell was that if you grow up in a bind when war trilingual hassel, there's people who have no problem, but the kids have no problem with that. in fact, it seems that it crawl we can tell it actually improves their cognitive ability and their vocabulary under their general intellectual functioning. so it's, i don't think there really is that kind of limit. we're very classic, but it's never actually been i don't think systematically tested in that regard. i think we don't understand all the prodigies. there are lots of other prodigies,

but sometimes they have other kinds of mental impairments. so we don't know what's going on there. so i think it remains an open question, but i think by and large it seems that you can learn fair number of languages when you're a kid and we just don't know what that down there is for ordinary people. i just don't know, and i do think learning languages can be like an antidote to the brain maladies of aids, like mars. i mean there's learning a language or speaking actually multiple ones make human brains more resilient elastic bands are there. i actually saw some results on that and it does seem that if you actually, even later in life yes, start learning a 2nd language or 3rd one down actually does help with plasticity and resilience

against memory loss. but again, the, the areas with alzheimer's and memory loss in language is a fairly new one. we have a couple people mit one of them and some professor she's been playing, who's working on that. and you can actually look at memory loss from in language as a kind of guide to what's going on with all timers. and she's found that bilingual people actually do better. so that's at least some added instance suggests that it is a help which i find very hard, i think for actually so some languages like italian or french have a melodic reputation reich. others like german, are viewed as more harsh to what extent this sound of the language influences cultural stereotypes about those who speak it. and there's

a funny story about that, which is that you can actually pick that up as early as, as newborn. so one of my acquaintances, angela fred ricci did these experiments at the marx plant, where what she did was taper, corey cries of newborn babies and births. and german babies would cry in a pattern like saying, well, and french babies would say it ran. so that was it, that actually followed the rhythmic pattern and you know, there's as much so you know, so where did they get that? and it turns out she looked into it. and of course what was happening was that the babies could actually hear their mothers speech in the room, right? because they were in the lower frequencies. actually you transmitted enough through into the uterus that the newborns actually have picked up on that already. so that

actually in a sense, prepares them for acquiring language that they're going to be born into, which is a kind of funny thing. but then there's this funny part that it actually followed the rhythmic patterns of french and english and versus german. it's funny how language issues looking at so biological evolution since the late the forming of language and culture to language and culture in part biological evolution as well. i mean, i've heard this idea that the french have sun special throat architecture that allows them to pronounce this rust the does this idea held under water and not clear whether there's sea, when you actually look at the cases with french. it's not clear that there's been enough time that biologically to have influence what the structure of your throat

is and whether that's china shack. so let me turn to another example. that's actually, i think a little less well known. because there was work published on this about a year and a half 2 years ago, where they looked at people in a sense it's quite sun in africa for able to make these so-called click noises, which are actually very rare in the roche languages hear noises. you make with you like that? yes, exactly. like rather like that. now that's very interesting for the following reason. softness. again, a dutch linguist, another friend of mine, renie, i bricks. who's at the university of you tracked? looked into this in some detail. and there's 2 interesting for facts about the clay sun. one of them is that they emerged very early in sub-saharan

africa almost about 140000 years ago as a kind of genetically isolated group. and when you can show they're genetically isolated, we can do this from the genome studies now. so that's one thing. and the 2nd thing is that this click sound, in fact, does require a certain structure going to the roof of your mouth. that makes it easier to make those sounds and others and that click languages you can show aside from some, you know, there's some few cases where the people borrowed the plates. some adjacent groups and others. so, but really was able to show that there's a release or like noise that you can ignore those complaining ridges are just associated with the quesada. so his hypothesis is, in that case, there is enough time for this kind of effect to build up on the roof here,

mashing to may to make it adapted to this, making a click sounds. so you think saturday, so there is sun, i didn't see least in this one case where that can happen. so maybe not the french because it's too late. and there's too many cheeses in france anyway. so, you know, but in the case of this sensor where sarah and language group made, i think there actually isn't least some suggestion or evidence for this. yeah, there is lots of evidence that people try to communicate by means of pictures before writing was invented, right? i mean, look at cave art, now we communicate with them. oh gee. and peter is more than words. i mean, it saves you time. it combines meanings and emotions. so in the real and which at least are we going to make words redundant and go back to basics, communicating with images rather than syntactic structures?

well, i think their language still has a, has a big age because with language, one of the things we can do that makes it so special is we can talk about things here, not just in the here and now. right, so that on the few naam happy and so on in the year now, but i can add i can make the sentences as complicated as i want with their structure. so i can say something like, i believe that mary thinks the bill said john, lasts. you know, yesterday it's hard to imagine, as you see, that he has a structure to it that looks like it. now branches down and he, and he can't just a linear sequence of emotions because it doesn't have that same ability to, you know, it can actually a little world, you know, the world where, you know,

john left yesterday. i can't, you know, wrap it up and put it inside another of mochi and take down bigger emotion wrapped that inside another one. he doesn't want to do that. you know, you don't let you do that. so that's the most geezer. you know, in a way of stripping language of some of its enormous expressive power. but i think you still need to talk about a world you can create which professor has been such a pleasure talking to you, i would carry on and on and on. but we have for this particular program, we get to do this again. ok, so good luck with everything. you great fun. thank you very well where you are. absolutely. so we'll see you hopefully sometime soon, take care to write

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