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Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Croeso and Welcome.
Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today I’m talking about…
SO, LANGUAGE REALLY IS A GAME?
No, I’m not talking about gamification again, not exactly. I’m talking about the book The Language Game by Morten H Christiansen and Nick Chater, narrated by Peter Noble, which I recently listened to on Spotify. These are only brief discussions of a few of the points in the book, linking them to language learning. There’s a tonne more information in the audiobook. There will be a link to it in the description.
The way language works has been explained in many different ways in the past as understanding changed. Was it created by ancient gods? Is it built into our genes? Is it scientific? Are our brains like computers? Or was it just trial and error happening all over the world concurrently?
These authors have come up with a theory, that language is like a game of charades. I’m assuming most people know what charades is, but just in case, it’s a team game where you mime something, like a film title, for other people to guess.
The authors give a number of examples of where visual signals, actions, have been used in real-life situations as language, rather than words. Could this be the basis of vocal languages that now exist? Or, did they develop from people making sounds instead? Or, could it be a combination of both?
The charades theory says that language isn’t a fixed code, but rather an interpretation, where the signals are built up over time.
At one point, it was likened to flash fiction, which pleased me, because I love writing flash fiction, in more than one language! Flash fiction means very short fiction. The point of it is to convey more than you actually say with the words, because you’re trying to use as few as possible. Competitions for flash fiction will have specific wordcounts that you have to keep within, or meet exactly, so you have to be economical. In fact, in some cases, you might deliberately miss information out to be ambiguous. The reader then has to interpret the meaning with what they’re given. So, in a conversation, you are, I guess, telling very short stories back and forth. You may get all the information, or you may not, and sometimes, you may make the wrong assumptions.
Anyway, codes. We’re all, as the authors explain, code breakers, breaking down the signals we’re being given to make sense of them by chunking syllables, words, phrases, etc. Relying on a store of word combinations. Predicting, getting the gist, getting messy. Creating speech in a just in time way, depending on what has come before. This is difficult, although we do it naturally. However, apparently, even in our own language, we make a mistake approximately every 1,000 words. Oops!
So, I guess, it’s understandable that we make a lot of mistakes in a foreign language and the whole chunking of word combinations for speech is very recognisable to me as a language learner. Even though I don’t learn by deliberately memorising, I definitely know plenty of word combinations. Plus, I know I’ve said in a previous podcast that we make mistakes in our own language, so that was not a surprise.
Meanings of words are described as light. In other words, each word can have many different uses that have built up over time, often with only tangential connections. This is necessary for language to develop. Absolute definitions would stifle language and not let us play around with meanings. And, multiple meanings of a word may not be the same across different languages.
I often find myself surprised when I discover that a word in another language has some of the same multiple meanings as English. I don’t know why this is, although I suspect it might be because when you learn a language, you’re often only given one meaning for it to start with. It’s like sayings that map exactly from one language to another. It feels weird. I suspect the latter are, however, not coincidences, but direct translations at some point in history. Interestingly, since I’ve been learning French from Italian on Duolingo, I have found that they frequently give you multiple definitions for the French word in Italian. Being English, this can sometimes cause me great confusion! However, it is useful, because I’m learning more Italian. I do like that we have this ability to play with words, though. It’s very useful when writing creatively and easy for me in English, but no so easy for me in Italian!
The authors suggest that it’s far from scientific. In fact, it’s shambolic, even in our now established languages. Things are constantly changing through repeated usage of new words and phrases, changes of meaning of existing words, etc. Grammar rules, such as they are, are thrown out the window when we actually speak. We stumble, stutter, talk in half sentences. It’s apparently been calculated that we correct ourselves approximately every 80 seconds. Does that mean we speak 1,000 words in 80 seconds? Or is correcting ourselves not a mistake?
This really does beg the question, why do we get so hung up about getting things correct in a foreign language? If grammar isn’t that important when speaking in our own language, surely it doesn’t matter in another one. I would say, perhaps, it’s because we don’t know what errors are acceptable, or, perhaps, common with those whose language it is. Or that we don’t even realise we’re doing it in our own language.
The authors suggest that language developed through cultural evolution and that it is built on pre-existing systems in the brain. So, we didn’t start with areas of the brain that were already specialised for language, but areas that had the right kind of functional abilities were used to help us construct it.
They say that there are no universal rules for different languages across the world. Not for types of words, or tones, or construction, or anything. And, in reality, no two people speak exactly the same language. Does that mean there are more than 8 billion languages? I guess, it does. Kinda. But not really. Around 7,000 is enough. More than any one person can learn, that’s for sure.
There’s a lot more in this book, such as discussing why some languages are more difficult, how different languages treat different concepts, whether brain size was affected by language, or vice versa, and how animals communicate differently from humans. That link is in the description, if you’re interested, but … one final thing.
The epilogue talks about artificial intelligence. This book was published in 2022, so only went as far as the first release of ChatGPT3, so not everything may be entirely correct still. However, the description of how neural networks function and how they’re different from human brains was, let’s say, comforting. I knew that they weren’t really language, but having it explained as sentence fragments put together and using patterns and statistics to create language, or should I say, languages, kind of solidified my thinking. If you talk to ChatGPT as part of your language learning, you are not talking to anything that understands what you’re saying. You’re talking to something that is using statistics to try to gauge what you want it to tell you from its huge database of information. It’s not the same thing, at all.
That’s all for today’s episode. Don’t forget to join me again next time, for more language learning tips, tricks and tales and in the meantime, check out the A Language Learning Tale YouTube channel for additional, non-podcast content.
Ciao, salut, hwyl and bye for now.