To Say, This Is My Uncle, In Chinese, You Have No Choice But To Encode More Information About Said Uncle.

To say, “This is my uncle,” in Chinese, you have no choice but to encode more information about said uncle. The language requires that you denote the side the uncle is on, whether he’s related by marriage or birth and, if it’s your father’s brother, whether he’s older or younger.

“All of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesn’t let me ignore it,” says Chen. “In fact, if I want to speak correctly, Chinese forces me to constantly think about it.”

This got Chen wondering: Is there a connection between language and how we think and behave? In particular, Chen wanted to know: does our language affect our economic decisions?

Chen designed a study — which he describes in detail in this blog post — to look at how language might affect individual’s ability to save for the future. According to his results, it does — big time.

While “futured languages,” like English, distinguish between the past, present and future, “futureless languages,” like Chinese, use the same phrasing to describe the events of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using vast inventories of data and meticulous analysis, Chen found that huge economic differences accompany this linguistic discrepancy. Futureless language speakers are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers. (This amounts to 25 percent more savings by retirement, if income is held constant.) Chen’s explanation: When we speak about the future as more distinct from the present, it feels more distant — and we’re less motivated to save money now in favor of monetary comfort years down the line.

But that’s only the beginning. There’s a wide field of research on the link between language and both psychology and behavior. Here, a few fascinating examples:

Navigation and Pormpuraawans In Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal community, you wouldn’t refer to an object as on your “left” or “right,” but rather as “northeast” or “southwest,” writes Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky (and an expert in linguistic-cultural connections) in the Wall Street Journal. About a third of the world’s languages discuss space in these kinds of absolute terms rather than the relative ones we use in English, according to Boroditsky. “As a result of this constant linguistic training,” she writes, “speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.” On a research trip to Australia, Boroditsky and her colleague found that Pormpuraawans, who speak Kuuk Thaayorre, not only knew instinctively in which direction they were facing, but also always arranged pictures in a temporal progression from east to west.

Blame and English Speakers In the same article, Boroditsky notes that in English, we’ll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers tend to say that the vase broke itself. Boroditsky describes a study by her student Caitlin Fausey in which English speakers were much more likely to remember who accidentally popped balloons, broke eggs, or spilled drinks in a video than Spanish or Japanese speakers. (Guilt alert!) Not only that, but there’s a correlation between a focus on agents in English and our criminal-justice bent toward punishing transgressors rather than restituting victims, Boroditsky argues.

Color among Zuñi and Russian Speakers Our ability to distinguish between colors follows the terms in which we describe them, as Chen notes in the academic paper in which he presents his research (forthcoming in the American Economic Review; PDF here). A 1954 study found that Zuñi speakers, who don’t differentiate between orange and yellow, have trouble telling them apart. Russian speakers, on the other hand, have separate words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). According to a 2007 study, they’re better than English speakers at picking out blues close to the goluboy/siniy threshold.

Gender in Finnish and Hebrew In Hebrew, gender markers are all over the place, whereas Finnish doesn’t mark gender at all, Boroditsky writes in Scientific American (PDF). A study done in the 1980s found that, yup, thought follows suit: kids who spoke Hebrew knew their own genders a year earlier than those who grew up speaking Finnish. (Speakers of English, in which gender referents fall in the middle, were in between on that timeline, too.)

Behold the 3Doodler, the world’s first pen that lets you draw 3D sculptures in real time.

I don’t under stand racism

because people are like eggs

some have light shells and some have dark shells

but there’s no point differentiating them

because they all taste the same once you crack them open and empty their guts on the frying pan

Sexually Harassed by Pidgey 

I think I am possibly the only person in London who notices the mating dance of the urban pigeons. I also think I talk about it too much, it makes people uncomfortable. 

“They do this little dance!” I tell my London friends. 

“Do they?” I know Londoners, they are being polite, but this turn of conversation has made them feel a bit awkward. Just a tad awkward. 

“Yes. The boy pigeon rustles up his feathers and coos in a special way, then he chases the female with his tail feathers all spread out and tries to mount her. It’s really cute.” 

Nobody will quite meet my eye. I demonstrate my pigeon coo. It doesn’t make the situation any better. 

Later I am eating my lunch on a park bench. There are pigeons hanging around trying to mate. The boy pigeon is trying really hard, but he is obviously unattractive. None of the females will let him get close. 

I feel sorry for poor rejected pidgey, so I feed him a corner of my sandwich. He gobbles it up. The other pigeons take the moment he is distracted as an opportunity to fly away. 

Pidgey is giving me the eye now. He rustles up his feathers and coos seductively. It’s awkward because there are no other pigeons around, he is cooing for me and I don’t like it. 

“I am a lesbian” I turn him down politely. 

He coos louder. People are looking. I shuffle to the other side of the bench. 

He rushes at me with his tail spread. I move my foot out of the way. 

I can’t get a moment of peace in this bloody city. 

On Assignment: Monkeys Use Stones to Crack Open Nuts

In the Brazilian Cerrado, a National Geographic explorer is studying how bearded capuchin monkeys learned to expertly use stone tools to crack open palm nuts.

by National Geographic.