TED 테드로 영어공부 하기 How language shapes the way we think by Lera Boroditsky

안녕하세요, Davey 입니다.

오늘 소개할 speech는, 언어가 어떻게, 우리가 생각하는 방법 이나 우리가 행동하는 것에 대해서, 영향을 미치는지에 애기하는 speech 입니다. Title은 How language shapes the way we think 입니다. 일단, 관련 speech link는 아래 참조 부탁 드립니다.

https://www.ted.com/talks/lera_boroditsky_how_language_shapes_the_way_we_think

How language shapes the way we think

본문과 단어 소개 시켜드리기 전에, 간단하게, speech 설명해 드리겠습니다. 일단, speech accent가 약간 톡톡 튀는 느낌입니다. 듣기에 좋을 실거라고 생각합니다. speech 서두에는 어떻게 우리가 언어를 이용하여, communication 하는지에 대해서, 간단하게 설명을 합니다.

1) Making Sound using my mouth -> 2) The sound traveling up to the ear of the person who you want to diction what you want to say. -> 3) The sound hitting the ear drum that transforms it into knowledge that we can understand.

좀 신기하면서도, 간단하게 이렇게 설명해주니까, 이해가 엄청 잘 되는 거 같습니다. 역시, 아무나 TED에서 speech 하는게 아닌가 보네요. 그리고, 이 분야에 대해서, 공부도 많이하고, 연구도 많이 하면서, 다방면으로 계속 생각하다 보니까, 이런 결과가 나오지 않았을까 생각이 듭니다. 저도 더 열심히 해야 되겠네요.

야간 삼천포로 빠진거 같은데, 다시 이어서 설명 드리겠습니다. 위에서 애기한대로, 간단하게 설명을 하고, 여러가지 예를 들어서, 어떻게 언어가 사람들의 생활에 얼마나 영향을 미치는지 설명을 합니다. 쿠타이어 in Australia 사람들을 애기를 하면서, 오른쪽, 왼쪽이라는 단어가 없고, 그냥 그 종족(?) 나름대로, 사고 방식과 개념으로 생활을 하는 것을 시작으로, 영어와 러시어를 비교를 하면서, 색깔을 이해하는 차이를 애기하고, 독일어와 스페인어를 비교하면서, 사물을 바라 볼때, 여성적으로 바라보는지 남성적으로 바라보는지에 대해서, 차이가 있다는 걸 설명을 합니다.

어떤 걸 설명할 때도, 언어가 영향을 미친다고 하네요. 예를 들어서, 연대기를 설명할 때, 어떤 언어는 시간흐름을 왼쪽에서 오른쪽으로 생각하는데, 어떤 언어는, 오른쪽에서, 왼쪽으로 생각해서, 설명을 하고 이해를 한다는 겁니다.

한편으로는, 약간, 나라마다 차선 및 운행 방향이 반대인 것도 언어와 관련 있지 않을 까 생각이 듭니다. 그리고, 사실 영어를 배우면 약간 헷갈리는 표현도 언어 때문에 차이가 나는 거 같습니다. 예를 들어, my head hit the wall (나는 그 벽에 부딫쳤다) 그런데, 직역을 하면, 나는 그 벽을 쳤다. 즉 일부러 다칠려고 쳤다는 거죠! 이것도 조목 조목 파헤쳐보면, 이상하다는 걸 알아 차릴 수 있을 겁니다. 하지만, 그 나라 언어를 쓰는 사람들에게는 그냥 맞는 거죠;;; 무튼 많은 영역에서 언어가 영향을 주는 거 같습니다. 그럼 설명은 여기까지 하고, 아래 본문 script 와 단어 참조 하시어, 공부 열심히 하세요. 저도 이 글 쓰고, 또 복습하겠습니다. 아래 script는 TED 홈페이지 해당 speech의 Transcript 내용 참조하였습니다.

 

- How language shapes the way we think script & words

 

TED 영상 사진 참조

 

So, I'll be speaking to you using language ... because I can. This is one these magical abilities that we humans have. We can transmit really complicated thoughts to one another. So what I'm doing right now is, I'm making sounds with my mouth as I'm exhaling. I'm making tones and hisses and puffs, and those are creating air vibrations in the air. Those air vibrations are traveling to you, they're hitting your eardrums, and then your brain takes those vibrations from your eardrums and transforms them into thoughts. I hope. 

 

hisses and puffs : 숨을 내쉬다

 

(Laughter) 

I hope that's happening. So because of this ability, we humans are able to transmit our ideas across vast reaches of space and time. We're able to transmit knowledge across minds. I can put a bizarre new idea in your mind right now. I could say, "Imagine a jellyfish waltzing in a library while thinking about quantum mechanics." 

 

vast : 어마어마한

(Laughter) 

Now, if everything has gone relatively well in your life so far, you probably haven't had that thought before. 

(Laughter) 

But now I've just made you think it, through language. 

Now of course, there isn't just one language in the world, there are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world. And all the languages differ from one another in all kinds of ways. Some languages have different sounds, they have different vocabularies, and they also have different structures -- very importantly, different structures. That begs the question: Does the language we speak shape the way we think? Now, this is an ancient question. People have been speculating about this question forever. Charlemagne, Holy Roman emperor, said, "To have a second language is to have a second soul" -- strong statement that language crafts reality. But on the other hand, Shakespeare has Juliet say, "What's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." Well, that suggests that maybe language doesn't craft reality. 

 

speculate : 추측하다

emperor : 황제

craft : 만들다, 공들여 만들다.

 

These arguments have gone back and forth for thousands of years. But until recently, there hasn't been any data to help us decide either way. Recently, in my lab and other labs around the world, we've started doing research, and now we have actual scientific data to weigh in on this question. 

So let me tell you about some of my favorite examples. I'll start with an example from an Aboriginal community in Australia that I had the chance to work with. These are the Kuuk Thaayorre people. They live in Pormpuraaw at the very west edge of Cape York. What's cool about Kuuk Thaayorre is, in Kuuk Thaayorre, they don't use words like "left" and "right," and instead, everything is in cardinal directions: north, south, east and west. And when I say everything, I really mean everything. You would say something like, "Oh, there's an ant on your southwest leg." Or, "Move your cup to the north-northeast a little bit." In fact, the way that you say "hello" in Kuuk Thaayorre is you say, "Which way are you going?" And the answer should be, "North-northeast in the far distance. How about you?" 

So imagine as you're walking around your day, every person you greet, you have to report your heading direction. 

(Laughter) 

But that would actually get you oriented pretty fast, right? Because you literally couldn't get past "hello," if you didn't know which way you were going. In fact, people who speak languages like this stay oriented really well. They stay oriented better than we used to think humans could. We used to think that humans were worse than other creatures because of some biological excuse: "Oh, we don't have magnets in our beaks or in our scales." No; if your language and your culture trains you to do it, actually, you can do it. There are humans around the world who stay oriented really well. 

 

beaks : 부리, 코

And just to get us in agreement about how different this is from the way we do it, I want you all to close your eyes for a second and point southeast. 

(Laughter) 

Keep your eyes closed. Point. OK, so you can open your eyes. I see you guys pointing there, there, there, there, there ... I don't know which way it is myself -- 

(Laughter) 

You have not been a lot of help. 
(Laughter) 

So let's just say the accuracy in this room was not very high. This is a big difference in cognitive ability across languages, right? Where one group -- very distinguished group like you guys -- doesn't know which way is which, but in another group, I could ask a five-year-old and they would know. 
(Laughter) 

There are also really big differences in how people think about time. So here I have pictures of my grandfather at different ages. And if I ask an English speaker to organize time, they might lay it out this way, from left to right. This has to do with writing direction. If you were a speaker of Hebrew or Arabic, you might do it going in the opposite direction, from right to left. 

But how would the Kuuk Thaayorre, this Aboriginal group I just told you about, do it? They don't use words like "left" and "right." Let me give you hint. When we sat people facing south, they organized time from left to right. When we sat them facing north, they organized time from right to left. When we sat them facing east, time came towards the body. What's the pattern? East to west, right? So for them, time doesn't actually get locked on the body at all, it gets locked on the landscape. So for me, if I'm facing this way, then time goes this way, and if I'm facing this way, then time goes this way. I'm facing this way, time goes this way -- very egocentric of me to have the direction of time chase me around every time I turn my body. For the Kuuk Thaayorre, time is locked on the landscape. It's a dramatically different way of thinking about time. 

 

egocentric : 자기 중심적인, 이기적인

 

Here's another really smart human trick. Suppose I ask you how many penguins are there. Well, I bet I know how you'd solve that problem if you solved it. You went, "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight." You counted them. You named each one with a number, and the last number you said was the number of penguins. This is a little trick that you're taught to use as kids. You learn the number list and you learn how to apply it. A little linguistic trick. Well, some languages don't do this, because some languages don't have exact number words. They're languages that don't have a word like "seven" or a word like "eight." In fact, people who speak these languages don't count, and they have trouble keeping track of exact quantities. So, for example, if I ask you to match this number of penguins to the same number of ducks, you would be able to do that by counting. But folks who don't have that linguistic trick can't do that. 

Languages also differ in how they divide up the color spectrum -- the visual world. Some languages have lots of words for colors, some have only a couple words, "light" and "dark." And languages differ in where they put boundaries between colors. So, for example, in English, there's a word for blue that covers all of the colors that you can see on the screen, but in Russian, there isn't a single word. Instead, Russian speakers have to differentiate between light blue, "goluboy," and dark blue, "siniy." So Russians have this lifetime of experience of, in language, distinguishing these two colors. When we test people's ability to perceptually discriminate these colors, what we find is that Russian speakers are faster across this linguistic boundary. They're faster to be able to tell the difference between a light and dark blue. And when you look at people's brains as they're looking at colors -- say you have colors shifting slowly from light to dark blue -- the brains of people who use different words for light and dark blue will give a surprised reaction as the colors shift from light to dark, as if, "Ooh, something has categorically changed," whereas the brains of English speakers, for example, that don't make this categorical distinction, don't give that surprise, because nothing is categorically changing. 

 

differentiate : 구별하다, 구분짓다

perceptually : 지각하여

across this linguistic boundary : 언어의 경계를 넘어

categorical : 절대적으로, 단적으로, 명확히

 

Languages have all kinds of structural quirks. This is one of my favorites. Lots of languages have grammatical gender; every noun gets assigned a gender, often masculine or feminine. And these genders differ across languages. So, for example, the sun is feminine in German but masculine in Spanish, and the moon, the reverse. Could this actually have any consequence for how people think? Do German speakers think of the sun as somehow more female-like, and the moon somehow more male-like? Actually, it turns out that's the case. So if you ask German and Spanish speakers to, say, describe a bridge, like the one here -- "bridge" happens to be grammatically feminine in German, grammatically masculine in Spanish -- German speakers are more likely to say bridges are "beautiful," "elegant" and stereotypically feminine words. Whereas Spanish speakers will be more likely to say they're "strong" or "long," these masculine words. 

(Laughter) 

Languages also differ in how they describe events, right? You take an event like this, an accident. In English, it's fine to say, "He broke the vase." In a language like Spanish, you might be more likely to say, "The vase broke," or, "The vase broke itself." If it's an accident, you wouldn't say that someone did it. In English, quite weirdly, we can even say things like, "I broke my arm." Now, in lots of languages, you couldn't use that construction unless you are a lunatic and you went out looking to break your arm -- (Laughter) and you succeeded. If it was an accident, you would use a different construction. 

 

lunatic : 미치광이, 정신병자

 

Now, this has consequences. So, people who speak different languages will pay attention to different things, depending on what their language usually requires them to do. So we show the same accident to English speakers and Spanish speakers, English speakers will remember who did it, because English requires you to say, "He did it; he broke the vase." Whereas Spanish speakers might be less likely to remember who did it if it's an accident, but they're more likely to remember that it was an accident. They're more likely to remember the intention. So, two people watch the same event, witness the same crime, but end up remembering different things about that event. This has implications, of course, for eyewitness testimony. It also has implications for blame and punishment. So if you take English speakers and I just show you someone breaking a vase, and I say, "He broke the vase," as opposed to "The vase broke," even though you can witness it yourself, you can watch the video, you can watch the crime against the vase, you will punish someone more, you will blame someone more if I just said, "He broke it," as opposed to, "It broke." The language guides our reasoning about events. 

 

as opposed to : ~ 와 대조적으로

Now, I've given you a few examples of how language can profoundly shape the way we think, and it does so in a variety of ways. So language can have big effects, like we saw with space and time, where people can lay out space and time in completely different coordinate frames from each other. Language can also have really deep effects -- that's what we saw with the case of number. Having count words in your language, having number words, opens up the whole world of mathematics. Of course, if you don't count, you can't do algebra, you can't do any of the things that would be required to build a room like this or make this broadcast, right? This little trick of number words gives you a stepping stone into a whole cognitive realm. 

 

coordinate : 좌표

realm : 영역, 왕국

 

Language can also have really early effects, what we saw in the case of color. These are really simple, basic, perceptual decisions. We make thousands of them all the time, and yet, language is getting in there and fussing even with these tiny little perceptual decisions that we make. Language can have really broad effects. So the case of grammatical gender may be a little silly, but at the same time, grammatical gender applies to all nouns. That means language can shape how you're thinking about anything that can be named by a noun. That's a lot of stuff. 

And finally, I gave you an example of how language can shape things that have personal weight to us -- ideas like blame and punishment or eyewitness memory. These are important things in our daily lives. 

Now, the beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us just how ingenious and how flexible the human mind is. Human minds have invented not one cognitive universe, but 7,000 -- there are 7,000 languages spoken around the world. And we can create many more -- languages, of course, are living things, things that we can hone and change to suit our needs. The tragic thing is that we're losing so much of this linguistic diversity all the time. We're losing about one language a week, and by some estimates, half of the world's languages will be gone in the next hundred years. And the even worse news is that right now, almost everything we know about the human mind and human brain is based on studies of usually American English-speaking undergraduates at universities. That excludes almost all humans. Right? So what we know about the human mind is actually incredibly narrow and biased, and our science has to do better. 

 

ingenious : 기발한, 독창적인

biased : 편향된, 선입견이 있는

I want to leave you with this final thought. I've told you about how speakers of different languages think differently, but of course, that's not about how people elsewhere think. It's about how you think. It's how the language that you speak shapes the way that you think. And that gives you the opportunity to ask, "Why do I think the way that I do?" "How could I think differently?" And also, "What thoughts do I wish to create?" 

 

elsewhere : 딴데, 다른곳에서

Thank you very much. 

(Applause) 

 

이상입니다. 언어가 어떻게 우리 생활에 영향을 미치는지에 대해서, 간략하면서, 쉬운 예를 통해서 설명을 해주니까, 한결 더 언어에 애착이 생기는 거 같습니다. 그럼 오늘도 같이 성장하시죠! 

 

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