YouSaid · the spoken record

Morten Christiansen

lines on the record: 24
first: 2024-09-15
most recent: 2024-09-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Situation, I want the cup, I've got the tea and milk. I want you to pass me that thing, so I'm going to do some gesture action or say a few words, which is going to get you to do the thing I want you to do. So it's all about meaning. So when computers are dealing with language, you should think of them as taking a totally different strategy to the way we're doing it”
2024-09-15 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Psychology of Language, with Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a phenomenal progress in the last, well, it was 30 plus years since Morton and I finished our PhDs, whatever it is, some similar figure, never seem possible to us that there would be machine translation of the quality that there is now. It's just incredible. But it hasn't been done in the way that people were trying to do it back then. So the way people were typically trying to do it was they were trying to get machines to understand, to translate language into some sort of logical form which would be a kind of applicable to any language. say English turn it into this logical language then you turn it back into whatever you want it to do. So you go through a logical language which is supposed to capture the meaning and the way it's not it's not been done like that it's been done in a sort of snippet like way you take you take a snippet of English and you turn it into a snippet of French and you can do all of that without any understanding at all a human language seems because it really is ultimately a charade based thing is completely different from that language is all about meaning it's all about where in this”
2024-09-15 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Psychology of Language, with Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think our perspective would be it very much goes back to this point about the charades. So, what those computers are doing, and they do it fantastically well, is they're taking, as you say, this vast amount of text, much of it, of course, in English, but a lot in other languages, especially machine translation, especially looking at text which are in multiple languages, so things like UN documents and the Bible and so on. So there you're able to both make a mapping between languages and you've got a lot of data out there to find patterns within each language. So the computer in a kind of rather cutting and pasting kind of way saying, oh, I've seen this snippet here and it seems to correspond to this snippet over here. It's not as simple as that, of course. All those sort of snippet alignment is very, very clever because the system is also learning the patterns within each language. So it's saying, oh, this snippet, say I took a snippet of English, turn it to a snippet of French and did that for all the snippets. They wouldn't really make any sense as French. So I must adjust all that to make sure that the thing that comes out is actually coherent in French. It's an incredible thing.”
2024-09-15 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Psychology of Language, with Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Inevitable, of course, we have nouns of verb, but of course we're divided up into little dogs and cats and trees. Well, actually, all the things one thinks are inevitable turnout. There'll always be a language out there, or that seems to be the generalization that surprises you.”
2024-09-15 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Psychology of Language, with Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's very hard to have sort of chit chat and sort of interpersonal, close interperson interactions in a language you're not very familiar with. So if you're going to have to know a cultural or an individual person very well, you have to have a shared language you're both extremely familiar with. And if that's not the case, it's going to be a struggle. So for example, that's the kind of thing that's not going to be easily taken over by clever language translation software. We do quite well for translating text, but it's going to be very difficult to translate fun chit-chat and conversation. And the other thing about learning languages, of course, is it makes you aware of the structure of language. So if you only have one language and you're immersed in it, you can kind of be unaware of what a strange thing language is and how remarkable. And it's only when you see that, oh gosh, this is the only one of a ton of ways of expressing things that it starts to look remarkable and strange and fascinating. So I think by looking other languages, that actually does change your perspective on your own language and just also the human condition. It makes one realize that things that can seem”
2024-09-15 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Psychology of Language, with Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thing it allows us to convey information in an efficient way, but it does create a bias. And of course, that's absolutely true with languages as well. So it may be, maybe English is biasing against cuteness and that's something we should definitely try to repair.”
2024-09-15 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Psychology of Language, with Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What language does is it makes certain things easier to express and certain things harder. Everything's possible because as with Chirades, it's kind of an illusion to think that there's, you know, I've got a fixed repertoire of Chirades and if I need to communicate gone with the wind, I'm just utterly stumped. I'll find a way of doing it somehow. It's not that there are things that are unsayable in one language, but it is easier to say some things than others. So that's clearly right. And that's in the same way that is true for something like any other kind of notation, like music. So musical notation, it'll be quite easy to write stuff down if it stays in one key. And if it's jumping around all over the place, it's all sharps and flat stops appear. And if you have to then suddenly not take things which are in between semitones, it gets really tricky. Or if the time signature is extremely peculiar. So it's not impossible to express anything musical notation pretty much, but depending on how your notational system works, it's going to make something easier and something's more difficult. And the same, of course, with maths. So developing notations are very, very important.”
2024-09-15 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Psychology of Language, with Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Another way in which English is unusual, though not that unusual is it's a blend of Germanic and Latin influences. So for a lot of things we describe, we actually have both a Germanic and a Latin root. So to describe them. So that means that there's just more overload, there's just more extra ways of saying things than there would otherwise be. And that's, again, helpful if you're trying to adjust a new situation. You've just got just a bigger, more diverse vocabulary to start with. So English has its advantages. As we've said before, there's no sense in which one language is better or more powerful than another because every language is continually in flux and is continually adjusting to our purposes. So if we have a gap, we fill it, we create something to fill it. So human beings are clever enough that they're not, as it were, hemmed in by an insufficient language.”
2024-09-15 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Psychology of Language, with Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ways of thinking about minds. There's something in my head and I want to get it into your head, so I'm sort of sending it to you, and you're not getting it. Or maybe I'm making an argument and you're undermining my argument and I'm strengthening my argument so that we can have a kind of castle defense and attack kind of sort of perspective on argumentation. And this is happening all the time. So as the world changes, as new technologies appear as new political realities occur, we're always going to be mutating our language to deal with the world that we're actually facing.”
2024-09-15 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Psychology of Language, with Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we do that so seamlessly we don't notice. So I think one of the things that is very nicely indicates is the inherently very metaphorical nature of language. So we don't think of thinking about a worldwide web of information as being like a spider's web, but that's sort of why we make the links, why the same word is used. But we don't think of it as a metaphor, really. We just see, well, it just is a web of information, literal truth, as it were. But language is always doing that for us. It's always allowing us to take a set of ideas from one domain and use it for another. And another example, not from world events or recent developments, is just something that we're all very familiar with, is talking about mental concepts. So it's the way that we think about minds is something that is very grounded in the way we think about physical objects. So John Lakeoff and Mark Johnson in particular in a great book, Metaphors We Live by, stress this a great deal. The idea, if I think about giving somebody idea or give someone an idea or picking up an idea or trying to get my point across, these are all sort of spatial.”
2024-09-15 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Psychology of Language, with Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's absolutely true every time there's a new thing to describe, we create a new vocabulary to describe it, and Brexit, the very term Brexit, is that we've now forgotten that it's a kind of neologism. I would have understood 30 years ago, but suddenly it's a new thing. Even COVID is a new coinage. The languages continually adjusting to the world we have to talk about. It's going like charades. If we have different bunch of things to describe or a different set of objects to communicate about, we'll start to use these are new terms or we'll use existing terms in new ways. So for example, in the case of the internet, I do a net electronic network, I mean, that's very different from a phishing net, but we don't really notice that, or a web similarly, or all the terminology we have for thinking about electronic communication is essentially just grounded in everyday stuff, which we're just mutating that and pulling it across. So sometimes we use new terms, but often, most often, actually, we're just using existing terms and for different purposes.”
2024-09-15 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Psychology of Language, with Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Became the kind of received wisdom, but language sizes in general have always really been pushing very hard against this idea that there's a right way to speak. There's a right way to pronounce words, the idea of that there's a sort of clear and appropriate pronunciation and denunciation and other ways of speaking a kind of muddled kind of murky jumbles. And the more you know about language, I mean, the more ludicrous that perspective becomes, because in fact all kinds of, all sorts of things which are viewed as slang or dialects turn out to be just as rich and complex and intricate and heavy all kinds of clever and rich patterns in them, just exactly the same as standard English or standard form of French or any other language. So there's absolutely no sense looking at the richness and complexity of the structures that people are learning and generating. There's nothing there which says, oh, this is a kind of a grander thing. And here's something which is a degenerate form. It's completely the opposite. Wherever people produce the variations in the way they speak, those variations just”
2024-09-15 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Psychology of Language, with Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is very hard and weighty question, very important one. I know that one of Morton's colleagues, he will know more about this than I do, has done quite a lot of work on the way in which language and just the way we speak, but also the words we choose and so on, can be a very important way, sadly, of discriminating against people just as physical traits are, and indeed for that matter, religious identity and so on. I mean, this is, you know, this is a potentially very big obstacle to a sort of a fair and just world, I think, that language does seem to be used as a marker of things which are then viewed as important signifiers of a social position or being worthy of respect and so on. I mean, how we deal with these problems is very hard to disentangle from the general problem of combating prejudice and creating greater equality. But I think one of the things that we do need to be doing as language scientists, particularly many quibbles with the way the language sciences have developed over the last 60 years or so, although what we're saying in the language game is not radically different from what many people would also say, but is radically different, I suppose, from what...”
2024-09-15 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Psychology of Language, with Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That one is a British English speaker, I suppose. I think it's pretty long tradition, really. Yeah, so I think it's always been the sense that whichever version of a language you speak, you tend to think, well, that is the canonical way. Of course, that's especially true if the language originated in your countries. This is a completely fictitious belief, of course, because the actual way in which English was spoken, if you went back to the period when English was radiating out from Britain to other countries, I mean, it's very different from the way we speak now. So the idea that this is a canonical way is how British people on the BBC speak today. That's what proper English is. And that's completely crazy. But I think that's just a longstanding sort of concern. It very much relates to the sense that there's one true language and we all ought to speak it, but it doesn't really have any proper basis.”
2024-09-15 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Psychology of Language, with Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Local variations, but it also means we can learn from each other more quickly. Picking up on Morton's point about texting, one of the things that's very interesting to sociolinguists, the people who study how language depends on the nature of that sort of social relationships we're in, is we all have lots of different ways of speaking. Kids speak differently to their parents and their teachers and each other, and we all speak differently to babies. So we have lots of different ways of speaking depending on social context. And we don't have trouble with this. And it's not surprising we don't because in most parts of the world, multilingualism is completely normal. The human brain is perfectly able to learn two or three or more languages, completely different languages, perfectly successfully. So learning a few different variations of the same language is really very straightforward.”
2024-09-15 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Psychology of Language, with Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of small points. One is that it's true the internet has completely changed the speed with which we're able to pick up ways of speaking for other places. And of course, so has just the rise of media in general, the international nature of certainly English means that I can learn phrases from far flung parts of the world, which I'd never come across before. But of course it also has a very stabilizing effect as well. So it means that because we can all do that, to some extent the language and the idioms and so on that we use may be more similar across different parts of the world because these different bits of language aren't just evolving independently. That type of effect was also caused by the rise of literacy. So as soon as you start to write a language down, it becomes much more stable because we're all reading the same word. Whereas if we're just living in different places, speaking our language purely orally, then language can converge much more quickly. So I think there are both interesting ways in which being more densely interconnected as a network of speakers makes us more similar to each other, though not certainly the tutelage.”
2024-09-15 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Psychology of Language, with Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a slightly broader way. So something like an example from my own childhood, when I was a child, pathetic, meant something worthy of sympathy. Rather than hopeless. Now that's now, I mean, pathetic can still mean worthy of sympathy, but it mostly now just means generally hopeless. So for people of my generation and older, there's this sort of slight nagging feeling that a word has really lost something important here. It's a terrible distinction being missed. But of course, what actually happens in general in languages is that as distinctions get blurred, new words start to take their place. So new ways of expressing the thing that we want to express. That's an important distinction. We'll find a way of describing. We don't really have much of a sense of that new stuff. In fact, we are so rather suspicious of it. These new fangled words, we don't like them. They're not proper words at all. So there's this general sort of suspicion of the new and the fear that always being eroded, but in reality, there's always this process of collapse and rebirth, which has always been going on throughout history of all languages.”
2024-09-15 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Psychology of Language, with Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This idea that language is in continual decay has been a very common one, of course. So it's very easy, particularly going back to the kind of school grammar perspective on language, to think that any change must be deviation from the one true way of speaking, the one we sort of think we must have learned at school. Of course, none of us really learn language at school. We all learn language talking to each other and talking to our parents. We don't actually go to school and get drilled on the precise grammar of any language. We can't learn that way. But we have this sort of sense that any changes must be degenerative. And that has been absolutely persistent across all languages and across centuries, scholars and politicians, and people of all shapes and sizes have been saying that language is decaying. We can scarcely comprehend each other anymore. And of course, there's a sense that once language starts to decline, that our ability to clearly express ourselves will also collapse. And I think one of the reasons, I mean, it's a complicated question, but one of the reasons I think this is true is that often what happens is that distinctions that seem very important start to get blurred. So people start to use a word with one meaning.”
2024-09-15 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Psychology of Language, with Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Children are learning to do in their learning language is they're learning this charade like playing skill and then to do that they have to learn they have to do some charades that's the thing that really matters so spending lots of time engaging with children and playing with them you know with the medium of language and engaging in some common interest that's the thing that seems to be really critical”
2024-09-15 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Psychology of Language, with Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This same genetic blueprint for language, and therefore our language is essentially deep down the same. And of course, I think the results of, as Morton's implying, the results of more detailed experimentation on how people process language is quite the opposite. Really each of us is different with different levels of skill, different ways of doing things. But as long as we overlap enough, we can still play the language game successfully.”
2024-09-15 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Psychology of Language, with Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Another small thing to add to that is that again, really intuitively, if we had no recourse to sort of standard theory in linguistics and language sciences, we might think, well, obviously language is just a skin like any other skill. I mean, it's like playing an instrument or learning to play football. And people are obviously going to differ in how good they are at it and how they do it in all kinds of ways. And they would just expect that. But again, that's not actually what the language sciences have been telling us for the last sort of 50 or 60 years. The assumption that has often been made at least is that language really isn't like a normal skill. It's something special. It's genetically wired into us. It's the same for everybody as long as language developed normally. It's a bit like the development of an organ. So it says the language is the same from one person to the next, rather like the lungs are the same. And the idea that has been prevalent in, for example, Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct, very excellent and influential book, but very much in a different tradition from the one we're working in, is that each of us has”
2024-09-15 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Psychology of Language, with Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You don't have to worry about that because you just have to give me a good enough clue to think, oh, that's the way I mean. And of course, that fits with the charades point as well, that in charades, you know, if I'm doing a Transaurus Rex action because I want to convey Jurassic Park, you might say, well, is it Transaurus rect or is it some other dinosaur? Well, it doesn't matter. It just has to be good enough to solve the problem in front of us. So the idea of the language game is that we're always playing these little games with each other and the localness and the specificity of them is kind of basic and they always require imagination to fill them in. But of course we play lots of games gradually. We start to transfer our play from one game to another game to another game. So we start to generalize in the language and our abilities you apply it becomes more and more broad. But ultimately we should think of it as a sort of local process rather than thinking of it as something monolithic, thinking that's this thing, the English language or any language specific language and it has a sort of fixed set of meanings and a fixed grammar and the whole thing is kind of set in stone.”
2024-09-15 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Psychology of Language, with Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The idea of the title language game, it partly goes back to Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher, who explicitly talks about language in the context of games. So the idea is that you should think of language as embedded in social interaction. So I might be asking you to fetch me something, or you might be wanting me to help you with something. So I'm playing a game which I'm saying, could you get that for me? Oh, pass me that cup, or I'd like some tea. And there's a kind of very, very sort of simple interaction, which is not just about sending messages to each other, but also it's about interacting, actually doing things together and understanding the relationship between language, those actual actions is very important. But also thinking of language in a very local way. So language is working in the context that we're actually in. So if I'm saying, can you pass me the cup? All I need to do is to indicate it's that thing I want. I don't have to have some general theory of theory or some general sense of, well, cups, what are they? What's that sort of metaphysical basis? Is every possible object you can imagine? Is that a cup?”
2024-09-15 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Psychology of Language, with Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To add a tiny thing to that, and you might think it's just obvious that language has evolved for communication. I mean, what else could it possibly be as a kind of intuitive thought? But that's not actually the way a great many people in the language sciences have thought. So Noam Chomsky, who's really the father of generative linguistics, the dominant approach to linguistics since the 50s, explicitly argues that language is not primarily for communication, it's primarily for thinking. So there is this kind of idea of an internal monologue that runs through your mind as you think. And if it's the case that that's really what language is really doing, then the monologue perspective doesn't look so strange. But of course, we go back to the intuitive idea that really it's communication is what language is all about, but communication takes two. And so it's trying to, as Morton says, it's trying to evoke the thoughts that are in my mind, in your mind. And that requires thinking about what you know, what I know, and what we share, and what's likely to trigger, what kind of thought in your mind. And that requires imagination and creativity. It's not something that is, as it were, a kind of an algorithm, something that can be done.”
2024-09-15 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Psychology of Language, with Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT