Think about it this way. We have 7,000 languages. Each of these languages encompasses a world-view, encompasses the ideas and predispositions and cognitive tools developed by thousands of years of people in that culture. Each one of those languages offers a whole encapsulated universe. So we have 7,000 parallel universes, some of them are quite similar to one another, and others are a lot more different. The fact that there's this great diversity is a real testament to the flexibility and the ingenuity of the human mind. 

LERA BORODITSKY is an assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience, and symbolic systems at Stanford University. 

Lera Boroditsky's Edge Bio Page

[49 minutes]

ENCAPSULATED UNIVERSES

I'm interested in how the languages we speak shape the way we think. The reason I got interested in this question is that languages differ from one another so much. There are about 7,000 languages around the world, and each one differs from the next in innumerable ways. Obviously, languages have different words, but they also require very different things from their speakers grammatically.

Let me give you an example. Suppose you want to say even the simplest thing, like "Humpty Dumpty sat on a …" Well, even with a snippet of a nursery rhyme, if you try to translate it to other languages, you'd immediately run into trouble. Let's focus on the verb for a moment. Sat. To say this in English, if this was something that happened in the past, then you'd have to say "sat." You wouldn’t say, "will sit" or "sitting." You have to mark tense. In some languages like in Indonesian you couldn't change the verb. The verb would always stay the same regardless of whether this is a past or future event. In some languages, like in Russian, my native language, you would have to change the verb for tense, but you would also have to include gender. So if this was Mrs. Dumpty that sat on the wall, you'd use a different form of the verb than if it was Mr. Dumpty. 

In Russian, quite inconveniently, you have to mark the verb for whether the event was completed or not. So if Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall for the entire amount of time that he was meant to sit on it, that would be one form of the verb. But if he were to say "have a great fall" that would be a different form of the verb.

In Turkish, and this is one of my favorite examples, you have to change the verb depending on how you came to know this information. If you actually witnessed this event with your own eyes, you were walking along and you saw this chubby, ovoid character sitting on a wall, that would be one form of the verb. But if this was something you just heard about, or you inferred, from say broken Humpty Dumpty pieces, then you would have to use a different form of the verb.

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INTRODUCTION

Over the years I've had the privilege to work with some of the more interesting thinkers of our time, individuals who, through their research in biology, physics, psychology, computer science, provide us with the evidence-based results that are the basis of the most reliable method of our knowledge about who and what we are. In this regard, nothing beats sitting down with Jared Diamond after one of his many (41 to date) trips to New Guinea to listen to this master story-teller hold forth on the windows to our past, whether the topic is rare birds, "primitive peoples", birth practices, the lives of the old, war, or the characteristics of all human societies until the rise of state societies with laws and government, beginning around 5,500 years ago.

A few months ago I visited him at his home in Bel Air, California, just a few doors up the road from the Bel Air Hotel. We sat for an hour while he recounted some his experiences in New Guinea. Fortunately, I had my video camera with me. What follows are three videotaped stories, which I have taken the liberty of presenting with the following titles:

• "If You Camp Under Dead Trees, And Each Dead Tree Has A One In 1,000 Chance Of Falling On You And Killing You"

• "One Of The Stupider, More Dangerous Things That I Did In My Life"

• "How I Discovered The Long-Lost Bowerbird, Initially Without Realizing It"

— JB

JARED DIAMOND is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. His latest book, published today, is The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? His other books include Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the widely acclaimed Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies, which is the winner of Britain's 1998 Rhone-Poulenc Science Book Prize. 

Jared Diamond's Edge Bio Page