1. What do you know about TED Talks?

What are their tasks and what is special about the

ED is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks (18
minutes or less). TED began in 1984 as a conference where Technology, Entertainment and
Design converged, and today covers almost all topics — from science to business to global
issues — in more than 100 languages. Such well-known personalities as the 42nd US President
Bill Clinton, Nobel Laureates Jame Watson, Murray Gell-Mann, as well as the founder of
Wikipedia Jimmy Wils, were included in the list of speakers.

2. Find information about the speaker. What is Lera Boroditsky famous for? What is the sphere
of her scientific interest?

Lera Boroditsky is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and Editor in

Her research combines insights and methods from linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, and
anthropology. Boroditsky has been named one of 25 visionaries changing the world by the Utne
Reader, and is also a Searle Scholar, a McDonnell scholar, recipient of an NSF Career award and
an APA Distinguished Scientist lecturer.

Her work has provided new insights on the controversial question of whether the languages we
speak shape the way we think. She has discovered important empirical examples of cross-
linguistic differences in thought and perception that stem from syntactic or lexical differences
between languages. This work has been influential in the fields of psychology, philosophy, and
linguistics in countering the notion that human cognition is largely universal and independent of
language and culture.

In addition to scholarly work, Boroditsky also gives popular science lectures to the general
public, and her work has been covered in news and media outlets. She also has taught the
"Introduction to Cognition and the Brain" class at Stanford since Spring 2006. Her research has
been widely featured in the media, including dozens of articles across outlets like the New York
Times, the Economist, Newsweek, the Boston Globe. She has also written for the popular press on
topics in language and cognition, including feature articles in the  Scientific American and The
Economist.

5. Answer the questions to the video:

1) What is the main function of language as stated by L.Boroditsky?

She said that language is one these magical abilities that we humans have. We can transmit really
complicated thoughts to one another. We are making sounds with our mouth as we’re exhaling.
We’re making tones and hisses and puffs, and those are creating air vibrations in the air. Those
air vibrations are traveling to other people, they're hitting their eardrums, and then their brain
takes those vibrations from your eardrums and transforms them into thoughts.
2) What did Charlemagne and Shakespeare’s Juliet say about language? Why does the speaker
use these quotations?

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. Speaker used these quotations to convey to viewers that this
question has been raised for centuries, and there is still no definite answer – we all have our
opinion and it’s normal thing.

3) What do you find out about Kuuk Thaayorre people? What is special about the way they
describe space? How do they say “Hello”?

Kuuk Thaayorre people live in Pormpuraaw at the very west edge of Cape York and what’s the
most interesting about them that they don't use words like "left" and "right," and instead,
everything is in cardinal directions: north, south, east and west. e.g. "Oh, there's an ant on your
southwest leg." Or, "Move your cup to the north-northeast a little bit. When you say "hello" in
Kuuk Thaayorre is you say, "Which way are you going?" and you have to report your heading
direction.

4) What does the experiment with the audience prove? Why do Kuuk Thaayorre children stay
oriented in space better than most people present at the talk?

There was a big difference in cognitive ability across languages, where one group -- very
distinguished group that didn't know which way is which, but in another group, she (speaker)
could ask a five-year-old children and they would know. These skills have been imposed on
them since infancy, so they have no difficulty navigating.

5) How do speakers of different languages organize their time? Give examples.

English (I may say American and also all European) speakers organize their time from left to
right, like normal writing direction. But Hebrew or Arabic speaker would go from right to left –
the opposite direction. Kuuk Thaayorre people don't use words like "left" and "right." 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. So, for them, time doesn't actually get locked on the body at all, it gets locked on the
landscape. For the Kuuk Thaayorre, time is locked on the landscape. It's a dramatically different
way of thinking about time.

6) Why can’t some peoples count objects?

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.

7) How do different languages divide up the color spectrum?

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 only one word for blue that covers all the possible shades for this color when
Russians using "goluboy" for light blue and "siniy" for dark blue

8) How does gender differ across languages?

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. So if you ask German and Spanish
speakers to, say, describe a bridge, it is grammatically feminine in German and grammatically
masculine in Spanish. German speakers are more likely to say bridges are "beautiful," "elegant"
using stereotypically feminine words, whereas Spanish speakers will be more likely to say
they're "strong" or "long," using masculine words.

9) How do different languages describe different events?

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 and you succeeded. If it was an accident, you would use a
different construction.

10) Does linguistic diversity increase or decline nowadays? Why?

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. So what we know about the human mind is
actually incredibly narrow and biased, and our science has to do better.

11) What are the main effects of language?

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. This little trick of number words gives you a
stepping stone into a whole cognitive realm. 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.

12) In what ways does the language influence the way we think?
The main use of language is to transfer thoughts from one mind, to another mind. The bits of
linguistic information that enter into one person's mind, from another, cause people to entertain a
new thought with profound effects on his world knowledge, inferencing, and subsequent
behavior. Language neither creates nor distorts conceptual life. Thought comes first, while
language is an expression. There are certain limitations among language, and humans cannot
express all that they think.

6. Prepare the information and answer the questions about the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis”:

1) What does the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis say about the connection between language,
psychology and culture?

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis proclaimed the influence of language on thought and perception. This, in
turn, implies that the speakers of different languages think and perceive reality in different ways and
that each language has its own world view. The issues this hypothesis raised not only pertain to the field
of linguistics but also had a bearing on Psychology, Ethnology, Anthropology, Sociology, Philosophy, as
well as on the natural sciences.

For Sapir, language does not reflect reality but actually shapes it to a large extent. n. Sapir‟s linguistic
relativity hypothesis can be stated as follows:

a) The language we speak and think in shapes the way we perceive the world.

b) The existence of the various language systems implies that the people who think in these different
languages must perceive the world differently

Sapir reflections on language were based on empirically verifiable data resulting from his own work on
American Indian languages. Sapir realized that there is a close relationship between language and
culture so that the one cannot be understood and appreciated without knowledge of the other.

2) What are the strong and weak points of this hypothesis?

Whorf may not have been right on all counts, but he was not wrong either. The fact that language
plays a role in shaping our thoughts, in modifying our perception and in creating reality is
irrefutable. Gipper phrased the question properly when he asked; to what extent does language
influence us? In view of the positive (favorable to the hypothesis), or neutral results which the
different tests have yielded, it would seem that the question of linguistic relativity is still a
subject of controversy today. Although the search for linguistic universals has been intensified, it
will be impossible to determine what is universal, if we don‟t know what is particular. Linguistic
forms and grammatical categories need not appear so different, if their functions are similar.

 The strong version, or linguistic determinism, says that language determines thought and

 The weak version says that linguistic categories and usage only influence thought and

They are both concepts associated with Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. Put simply, linguistic
determinism (the strong version of the hypothesis) is based on the argument that language shapes
the speakers’ way of thinking and how they conceptualize the world.

Linguistic relativity (weak version), on the other hand, argues that people who speak different
languages perceive and think about the world quite differently from one another. Many of the
evidences put forward to talk about linguistic relativity is based on color codability, for which
the argument is that the lexical difference (caused by having a particular name for a color or not)
result in a distinct judgement of distances between colors.

I believe the most fascinating example for this concerns the aboriginal people who do not have
the relative directions we have such as left, right, forward(s), backward(s), up, and down. Unlike
us, they always know which side is which point; east, north, west, or south.