What You Didn’t Know about Language Barriers, Roxanne Pomerantz 2020
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| What You Didn’t Know about Language Barriers, Roxanne Pomerantz 2020 |
Translator
by Sm Masum : Alina SiluyanovaReviewer: Denise RQ How many of you can speak
more than one language? Now, keep your hands up if you can speak more than two.
And how about three? Very impressive! (Applause) But did you know that you
actually could have easily learned 25 languages? It's true.
This is a natural
human phenomenon that any normal child born anywhere in the world is capable of
learning any language that he or she is exposed to. And did you know that the
languages that your child is exposed to before the age of 7, which is also
known as the critical age period, are the only languages that he or she will be
exposed to later in life? Leonard Bloomfield said that "acquisition of a
language is doubtless the greatest intellectual feat that anyone of us is ever
required to perform." So, I asked myself and some others in the overseas
student program here: why do we learn languages? At first, we all learn
language because we have to. As humans, we're designed to learn a language just
like we're designed to walk. There is simply no preventing it. But then, there
are some of us who actually do it for fun. We go through the struggle, we put
in the effort, feeling wrong all the time, but we love it because the rewards
are so great. It's awesome to speak another language, to carry it with you
everywhere you go; to travel and communicate with people in their native
language makes conversations so much more personal, and you actually get to
enjoy more out of life because it gives you the opportunity to understand more
music, and movies, and games from around the world.
So I want to ask you
another question, and I want you all to think about this: if we started taking
advantage of the amazing ability that children have to learn languages and the
plethora of free language learning tools we have in our devices today, could
we, by reducing language barriers, reduce other barriers in society? Which begs
me to ask another question: what exactly are language barriers and what do they
do? I know what some of you are thinking: you're at the dinner table, and
you're between your mother, who is Russian, and your beautiful American
girlfriend, and you're having a moment of realization that you've just hired
yourself out as a translator. So, you have to spend the whole evening hearing
everything 3 times, and even though you thought that you could speak English
and Russian perfectly, you're starting to feel confused and frustrated, and
you're desperate for a couple of minutes of alone time just to think in
whatever language you choose to think in. But there is a lot more to language
barriers that I want you to know. Have you ever heard of linguistic relativity?
Linguistic relativity is the field that asks questions on the relations between
language, perception, and thought. The core theory is called the deterministic
theory, it is scientifically proven, and it states that the language you speak
shapes the way you think and influences your behavior. The fathers of linguistic
relativity, Benjamin Whorf and Edward Sapir, state that if a word doesn't exist
in your language, you won't know the concept [behind the word]. Now, I think
that those guys can be a little extreme in their theories. I think rather than
if a word doesn't exist in your language, you are a lot less likely to identify
with that concept. One of my friends here, in Israel,a native German speaker,
told me a story once of how the English language changed the way that she
thought about love. She told me she still remembers the first time she heard
the term "falling in love", and that she was shocked at the use of
the language because she had never thought of being in love as something that
happened suddenly and dramatically, and she pictured someone actually falling,
and she could feel that, and then she knew that someday she will experience
"falling" in love and not just "being" in love. Also, in
body language, we find interesting differences among languages. In Hebrew, this
means "waits".
However, this is a great insult in Italy, and I wanted
you all to know that. (Laughter) And the most obvious differences in languages
that are influencing our thoughts and behaviors are in vocabulary. One
scientific experiment linguistic relativity showed how gender association impacts
people's perception. This study used the word "key", which is in
German a masculine word, and in Spanish it's feminine. So, subjects were asked
to come up with words to describe a key. And the German speakers used words
such as "heavy", "durable", "strong",
"useful", "metal", but the Spanish speakers chose words
such as "golden", "lovely", "little",
"delicate" and "shiny"to describe the same word --
"key". Another interesting difference finds among languages is in the
perception of correctness. I read in the study by John Myhill at University of
Haifa that correctness in present-day English and most European languages is
based on prestige. So, the development of these languages has actually followed
the trends of its most elite speakers. But other languages perceived
correctness in a much different way. Languages such as Arabic, and Hebrew, and
Icelandic are based on textual references. So, if a word appears in a text--in
Arabic, which is based on the Koran, and Hebrew is based on The Mishneh Torah if
a word or grammar appears in this text, it is correct, and if it doesn't, it is
not correct. For these languages, there is no connection between correctness
and prestige. And there are many, many words in languages that don't appear
anywhere else such as "stam" in Hebrew, which can be translated
into English as "just kidding", but not really -- it is a unique word
to let someone know you're not being serious. And "khalomot Paz" is how you say "sweet dreams" in Hebrew, but actually translates
directly as "golden dreams".
And there is a word in German that I
love called "Fernweh", which dictionaries translate as "itchy
feet", and it is the opposite of "homesick". It describes the
feeling that you need to travel. So, when my German friend taught me this word,
I thought: "Wow! How I wish that this word existed in my language!"
And I wondered that if we used such a word, how my experience of feeling like
the only one in my family with a strong desire to see the world may have been
different. So, a few weeks ago, after I auditioned to be up here on the TEDx
stage, I reached out to my psychology professor back in New York and asked him
what he thought about linguistic relativity. And what he says explains the
story of my friend and, in terms of psychology and memory, what happened when
she learned a new term about love. He said: "It is the breadth of our
language, not our past experiences, which help color our lives. That is, in
memory, the language labels that we assign events and experiences shape,
indeed; limit the way that we can remember them." For example, if the only
positive emotion word we knew was "happy", all positive memories are
labeled as "happy memories". And if they all fitin that
"happy" bucket together, then their shared features, which make them
labeled as "happy", will be reinforced and at times amplified at the
expense of their differences to allow for better access. This is because your
mind categorizes everything with language labels so that it can reach for your
memories as quickly as possible.
And everything that you say and do, every
decision you make, every conversation that you have, is just a consequence of
some memories, right? So, in other words, your ability, overall, to access your
memories is actually directly related to your breadth and knowledge of
vocabulary. Because our languages are constantly changing, language barriers
are just growing bigger and bigger. So, what do you think everyone? If we
started to take advantage of children's amazing ability to learn languages and
the plethora of free tools that we have to learn languages today, could we, by
reducing language barriers, reduce other barriers in society? The answer to me
is crystal clear. By emphasizing foreign language studying in your community,
you are seizing an opportunity to reverse the creation of gaps in the way that
we think and behave. There are so many issues in society today that are
thought-based, like racism, and hate crimes, and bullying. So, by increasing
the knowledge of the language, we can overcome these differences; also, by
having more multilingual programs for children, of course, because it's that
critical period before age 7, where we have this opportunity. So, one such
program exists in Jaffacalled the Orchard of Abraham's Children.
It was founded
by a Palestinian man and a Jewish woman, who is married. And they've
established 3 kindergartens that teach in both Arabic and Hebrew, and celebrate
both cultures' holidays. So, programs, like this one, are using bilingual
education to promote peace and co-existence in a humanitarian, non-political
way. And it is so effective because our languages are a huge part of our
identity. Being born to reform Jewish parents, gave me really early exposure to
the Hebrew language, and if it wasn't that early, early exposure, I am sure I
wouldn't be here, in Israel, studying linguistics, or giving this talk to you
about the power of being able to identify with more than one language. Now, I
want to leave you with this quote by Helen Keller, who was an American author,a
political activist, and the first deaf-blind person ever to receive the
Bachelor of Arts degree: "Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of
something forgotten -- a thrill of returning thought; and somehow, the mystery
of language was revealed to me. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth
to a new thought." Thank you.
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