Shadowing Practice: how language shapes the way we think - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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Hi, sweet beans.
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Welcome back to Wild Geese.
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I'm your host, Anna.
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And today we're talking about how the limits of our language are the limits of our world.
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And I have to say, I had kind of a hard time with this one because a lot of this is like linguistics.
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I don't know anything about linguistics.
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I never took a linguistics class in college, but there were a couple of little curiosities that were making me interested in how language might change our worldview.
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So I had had a couple of conversations in a row
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with friends where we were talking about how the English language often feels like it's trying to
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compartmentalize us into these like static identities the way
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that we talk about even our emotions we say I am sad versus saying something like I am experiencing sadness
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or like when we think of attachment theory we say I am avoidant I am anxious versus I am exhibiting anxious behaviors.
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I am exhibiting avoidant behaviors.
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And I want to be cognizant of the fact
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that a good amount of the people that listen to wild geese do not speak English as a first language.
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So I will be really interested to hear y'all's perspective on all of this.
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But because I only speak English fluently, I think that that dramatically limits my worldview.
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But anyway, I've been trying to learn Spanish for years.
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I hope one day that I can really seriously immerse myself in the language in a way
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that I haven't been able to yet.
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But another thing that made me curious about all of this is that I started using the app language transfer.
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And I talked about this a little bit on the vlog that I put out the other day.
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But language transfer is so cool
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because it takes what you already know from your language
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and transfers it over into the language you're trying to learn instead of just teaching you a bunch of vocabulary words.
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And it also gives you a lot of linguistic background that apps like Duolingo just never do.
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I'm going to be quick about this because it's kind of a sidebar, but it's very fascinating to me.
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There's a rule that applies for many, many words in the English language that end in T-I-O-N, that you can just transfer that right over into Spanish by changing it into C-I-O-N.
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So imagination, for example, would be imaginación.
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Please forgive my pronunciation.
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And then from there, you can find thousands of Spanish verbs by just changing the ending from C-I-O-N to A-R.
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And changing that ending would take imagination and turn it into to imagine.
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So then it's imaginar.
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And you can do this with so many words.
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You can take conversation and it becomes conversación and then that becomes conversar, like on and on and on.
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And something that was very striking to me as I was listening to my language transfer lessons is
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that if you take the word experimentation, transfer it over into Spanish into experimentación and then switch it to the verb,
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which is experimentar, then that means to experiment, but it also means to experience.
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So the words for to experience and to experiment are the same in Spanish.
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And the teacher was kind of just talking about how
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that could be a little bit of a life lesson in and of itself.
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Like those simple words are a particular way of experiencing the world around you.
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So those were like the first seeds of curiosity that this episode was born from.
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And around the same time that I was getting curious about this, my boyfriend was also getting curious about it, but in a very different way.
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And I just thought it was interesting when I started researching how my curiosities went in a different direction than his did.
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So like a couple of weeks ago, he went down a rabbit hole about proto-indo-european, which if you haven't heard of proto-indo-european,
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I will let you do your own research about that because I don't want to get too off topic here.
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But basically what was happening was that he was getting curious about a branch of linguistics called comparative historical linguistics.
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And I was so impressed with the way his brain worked because basically he fell down this rabbit hole.
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And then the next day he was able to like pull up a map
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and like show me the ways that these languages have been tracked through history.
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Like it was mind blowing to me, But also my brain doesn't latch on to that in the same way that it does for him.
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The thing about linguistics that ended up really pulling me in is what I learned to be called linguistic relativity.
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And I think when I first sat down to do the research for this episode, I was kind of trying to force my curiosity to go in a similar direction that his did.
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And our brains were just pointing us towards different like lines of inquiry, you know, so I kind of had to just drop that for a second.
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And I actually had a listener who suggested the podcast Lingthusiasm, specifically the Sapir-Whorf episode.
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And according to the dictionary, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a hypothesis first advanced by Edward Sapir in 1929 and subsequently developed by Benjamin Worf,
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that the structure of a language determines a native speaker's perception and categorization of experience.
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And this was kind of the beginning of the linguistic relativity branch of linguistics.
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Quick correction, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was not the beginning of the branch of linguistics that is linguistic relativity.
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It was a continuation of a conversation that happened more towards the 19th century.
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And that's kind of where I want to focus today, because this is really getting me curious about what other linguistic lessons are out there hiding in other languages.
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So I want to talk about how the language we speak changes our actual sense of morality.
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I want to talk about how niche internet subcultures is kind of like fracturing the English language
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and making it harder and harder for two people who still speak the same language to even understand each other.
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And I just want to out front say, I think the thing that I got out of all of this research
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that is like the most clear to me is
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that indigenous wisdom can be found in languages that were systematically and violently disappeared by colonizers.
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And I genuinely think centering and and listening to Indigenous voices would not only heal
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that aspect of personhood that I was talking about at the very beginning, but it would also heal our relationship with the earth.
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You know we're going to talk about braiding sweetgrass today.
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So let's start with some conceptual metaphors that are really prevalent within the English language specifically.
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Eleanor Stern has a fantastic sub-stack essay called The Hatred of Metaphor,
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where she goes into how different writers who use metaphor differently conceptualize the world differently.
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So she's really staying within the English language in this essay, and she's talking about how there are people who write really flowery prose
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and there are people who are much more straightforward
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and conversational in their writing but that doesn't necessarily mean
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that people who are more straightforward and conversational use less metaphors
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because metaphors are so prevalent in our language and three of the metaphors
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that she zeros in on our argument is war time is money
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and status is height she says we talk about argument through the framework the conceptual metaphor
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that argument is war among the examples they list he demolished my argument i've never won an argument with him Meanwhile, time is money.
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You're wasting my time.
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He's living on borrowed time.
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We also metaphorically map a huge variety of concepts onto the directions up and down to give an abridged list.
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Health.
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His health declined.
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Rose from the dead.
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Happiness.
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Being in high spirits versus being depressed.
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Consciousness.
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Waking up.
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Falling asleep.
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Status.
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Upward mobility versus the bottom of the hierarchy.
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And so many metaphors that we use are so baked into our language
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that they don't even really register as metaphors anymore
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but this reminded me of an irish proverb
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that i'm not going to try to say
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because i don't know the language and i don't want to butcher it
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but it translates to time is a good storyteller
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which is an entirely different way of looking at time
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and i just wonder how our perception of time must change when we look at it as money versus a storyteller
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Those two things flow very differently in my mind.
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Brianna Nielengshag over on Substack actually has a few posts that are really interesting about the Irish language.
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And the Irish language actually answers that initial piece of discomfort with the English language that I was talking about,
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about how we talk about our emotions as if they are a piece of our static identity.
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And she says, in the Irish language, we are not our emotions.
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We are not sad or anxious.
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we have sadness or anxiety on us.
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To say I am sad, we say, and please forgive me, I am sure I'm going to butcher this, tabran orm, there is sadness on me.
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I am anxious, ta imni orm, there is anxiety on me.
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The language recognizes these as passing states, not permanent fixtures of who we are.
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Now put a pin in the fact that the Irish language is nearly extinct, and that's not a coincidence.
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That's a of something called lingicide, aka language killing.
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And I think when we can start to see these languages that have been systematically killed off
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as like doors to a different way of seeing the world, versus just like a group of vocabulary words, I can start to understand why forces of colonization
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that want me to think
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that my time is something to sell would also find it very important to silence languages that offer a different perspective.
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And there's a creator on TikTok named Words at Work, and he talks all about linguistics.
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Highly recommend giving him a follow.
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But he made a TikTok about how normalized it is to use words like illegal and delinquent.
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He says, have you ever heard a really bad decision be described as criminal
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or a kid who's a real jerk be described as a delinquent?
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Much more blatantly, have you ever heard anyone be described as an illegal?
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An illegal.
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Think about that for a second.
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Someone who's not just a criminal, but whose very personhood is an act of criminality because they dare to exist at the wrong place at the wrong time.
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He says all of these examples rely on an understanding that legality and morality are the same.
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And then this was back in 2024.
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He brought up a proposition in California to bar slavery in any form in the state
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and six and a half million people voted no. So they voted to keep slavery.
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And why these people voted no is because slavery was being framed as punishment for a crime.
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And he went on to say, which I think this kind of has to be the thesis of this episode, but he says, the state has the power of violence, but language has the power to normalize it.
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And we need to be very conscious of that power.
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Hi, day two of recording.
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I got hungry and tired, but we're back now.
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Anyway, this consciousness that I think is required to use language in a way
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that doesn't turn violent brings me to the etymology of the word culture, because the word culture is actually an agricultural metaphor.
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Edward S.
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Casey wrote, the very word culture meant place tilled in Middle English.
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And the same word goes back to Latin colere, to inhabit, care for, till, worship.
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To be cultural, to have a culture is to inhabit a place sufficiently, intensely, to cultivate it, to be responsible for it,
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to respond to it, to attend to it caringly.
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And I don't know why when I first heard this, it like really struck me because it's interesting how metaphors are baked into words themselves.
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And before this, I've never thought about what the actual word culture means, but it makes a lot of sense that it would mean basically to care for yourself and the people around you.
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But I think the nature aspect of this metaphor opens it up to not just the people around you, but the place around you,
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which gets us one step closer to what we're going to be talking about in a second, which is Robin Wall Kimmerer's idea of the grammar of animacy.
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But before we get into that, I want to talk about this essay called The Balkanization and Babelification of the Internet by Ru Yi and Ruby Justice Thalat.
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And they say, the pace at which we're creating new words, then recontextualizing their meanings in hyperbolic meme
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and joke formats is moving faster than ever before in our age of relentless online discourse.
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As we're fed more content, we are pushed deeper into algorithmic niches.
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In return, we are encouraged to engage with more extreme and polarizing identifiers because it is more labelable, more indexable by the machine,
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the creation of the quote-unquote island.
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Babelification is the process by which, after splintering, insular digital groups develop unique languages,
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which makes reintegration and shared digital spaces difficult, if not impossible.
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When someone believes their insular language in online echo chambers is commonplace reality, clashes ensue when
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that same individual is placed in a context where other people aren't privy to their language
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because they are fundamentally misunderstanding one another.
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And this is really interesting to think about because I feel like sometimes this happens even in my own comment section.
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Sometimes people say something and I'm like, yeah, that is technically English, but what you just said is so decontextualized for me.
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I have no idea what you're talking about.
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And I think we just got a very clear example of the real life implications of this with the Charlie Kirk case, with the things that were written on the bullet casings.
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And then everyone in the internet kind of flooding the space to be like, I think this is what it means.
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I think this is what it means.
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This is what people are saying in discord servers
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and trying to trace back these like meme-ified sayings to some sort of semblance of meaning.
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So you've got people that think that they're saying something intelligible, but they're actually so like up in the clouds that the people on the ground have no idea what they're saying.
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This is really where the alt-right pipeline gets tricky
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because you've got dog whistles that are burrowed into these memes that only some people in the group can recognize.
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The definition of a dog whistle is the use of coded
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or suggestive language in political messaging to garner support from a particular group.
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And it's interesting that this is a tactic whose very title is a dehumanizing metaphor.
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By nature, this is meant to isolate.
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So I don't think the answer is like beating them at their own game and like making our own exclusionary languaging.
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Instead, I think the response to dog whistles needs to be running in the opposite direction, which is finding some sort of uniting factor
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that can bring the English language back to something
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that helps to humanize people and the land that they live on
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and all of the living beings that they live in community with instead of doubling down on dog whistles.
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So that brings me to Braiding Sweetgrass, my favorite part of this entire conversation.
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I have talked about Braiding Sweetgrass so much.
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I read it years ago and I still go back and read it like it's my Bible.
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And as I was researching for this episode, I remembered a chapter in Braiding Sweetgrass where Robin Wall Kimmerer
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is talking about her experience of trying to learn the Potawatomi language.
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And Robin is coming from the perspective of a botanist who's also part of the Potawatomi nation.
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And she talks at the beginning of the chapter about how the language of science kind of falls short
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because so much of it is based around just labeling things that we can see.
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And the thing that originally got her interested in learning Potawatomi was one word, and that word was papawi.
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And this is what she writes.
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Papawi, she explains, translates as the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight.
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As a biologist, I was stunned that such a word existed.
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In all its technical vocabulary, Western science has no such term, no words to hold this mystery.
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You'd think that biologists, of all people, would have words for life.
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But in scientific language, our terminology is used to define the boundaries of our knowing.
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What lies beyond our grasp remains unnamed.
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And she goes to this convention of speakers, and it's like the first time
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that all of the native Pottawatomie speakers will be in the same room together and however long.
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And at the time that this book was written, there were nine native speakers left.
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Robin says, English is a noun-based language, somehow appropriate to a culture so obsessed with things.
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Only 30% of English words are verbs, but in Pottawatomie that proportion is 70%.
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And then she goes on to tell this story about how the first time
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that she saw Saturday talked about in pottawatomie it actually kind of really annoyed her
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because you wouldn't say it's saturday you would say to be a saturday
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and she was like this makes no sense she was like you can't be a saturday
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or to be a bay she was like you can't be
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a bay it was hard to wrap her brain around
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that making grammatical sense but she goes on to say a bay is a noun only
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if water is dead but the verb wikwagama to be a bay releases the water from bondage
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and lets it live to be a hill to be a
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sandy beach to be a saturday all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive
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water land and even a day the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world the life
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that pulses throughout all things through pines and nut hatches and mushrooms This is the language I hear in the woods.
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This is the language that lets us speak of what wells up all around us.
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In Potawatomi and most other indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family,
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because they are our family.
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And I want to come back to the thing
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that Robin said about English being primarily nouns and how that makes sense for a culture that's so obsessed with things.
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So much of Robin's work is about rewiring our understanding of the world around us
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so that we can see our responsibility in everything we touch.
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We've talked about how language can enable us to dehumanize other people, and that also extends to the quote-unquote things that surround us.
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Language can also enable us to devalue and denigrate the ground beneath our feet.
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And I don't want to get too preachy about overconsumption, but the way that we are spending our money can mean the difference between life
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and death for the living beings that we share this earth with.
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And that's a huge responsibility on our part.
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And I'm not just talking about the environment.
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Like if you have been paying attention, then you just saw what happened with Jimmy Kimmel and Disney
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and all of the boycotts against Disney and how Jimmy Kimmel came back because of the mass boycotts.
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Like Disney lost billions of dollars.
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And I think if we're serious about wanting serious change, we do need to change our thought processes to stop seeing the quote unquote things around us as just things.
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Robin talks about how in Potawatomi, if, for example, you saw a plant, you wouldn't ask, what is it? you would say, who is that?
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And I was recently reading another book that Robin wrote called The Service Berry.
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She says, how we think ripples out to how we behave.
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If we view these berries or that spring as an object, as property, it can be exploited as a commodity in a market economy.
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When something moves from the status of gift to the status of commodity, we can become detached from mutual responsibility.
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And that's kind of getting into the more broad idea of a gift economy that she lays out in The Service Berry.
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Highly recommend going to check it out.
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But I want to unpack this idea
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that how we think ripples out to how we behave
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and go back to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that I was talking about before.
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The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis goes deeper than just suggesting that the way that we speak changes the way that we think.
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It goes as far as to say that the way that we speak changes the way that we actually perceive reality.
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And there's a bit of controversy around this hypothesis that I will admit I'm not totally sure that I completely grasp.
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So linguists, please sound off in the comments when I inevitably misspeak.
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But there's an article on ION called Our Language, Our World, which touches on the disagreements about this idea within the world of linguistics.
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It says, switching between languages, we may feel as if we're stepping from one world into another.
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But is this just an illusion?
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Does each language really embody a different worldview or even dictate specific patterns of thought to its speakers?
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there's a recurring skepticism around linguistic relativity, engendered not only by the difficulties of pinning it down,
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but by a deep-seated ambivalence about the assumptions and implications of relativistic doctrines.
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Which, when I read that, I was like, it totally makes sense that the thing
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that I would be the most curious about is the thing that's the most difficult to pin down in absolutes.
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But like, of course, questions about the way that people perceive the world are going to be very hard to quantify.
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So in the 1940s, Benjamin Lee Worf actually did this study with the Hopi people where he concluded
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that the Hopi have no concept of time because they have, quote, no words, grammatical forms,
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construction, or expressions that refer directly to what we call time.
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And basically, there were a lot of flaws about this study that I don't really understand because I am not a scientist.
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From my understanding, this was pretty quickly disproven.
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And I guess the sort of like mishandling of that study really helped to fuel the fire of skepticism around linguistic relativity.
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But in that essay, Our Language, Our World, Sam Dresser says, linguists and psychologists who could not ignore these questions have brought relativity back into academic mainstream and delivered solid results.
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To name just one example, in ongoing cutting-edge work, researchers have shown
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that certain languages may allow speakers to unlock senses
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that are the common possession of all humans but remain unutilized by most people.
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And the example he uses, this is really interesting, is that in the Gurindji language, which is spoken in northern Australia,
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they use the cardinal directions not just on a geographical scale but also to locate things on their body.
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So say a fly landed on your right leg and that was oriented towards the west.
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The way that they would talk about that is they would say, this is the outer upper west of my leg.
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The fly landed here on my leg, which just makes my brain hurt because I'm so bad at directions.
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I can't even conceptualize the cardinal directions when I'm walking down the street, let alone think about where that's placed on my body at any given moment.
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But Dresser says, we are all, in a sense, compasses.
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English speakers are, for the most part, not consciously aware of this, even though their brain activity changes when surrounding magnetic fields are manipulated under experimental conditions.
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Recent experiments by the Australian linguist Felicity Meekins and her collaborators have shown
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that some Guringi speakers can reliably report on shifts in ambient magnetic fields.
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Guringi speakers' habit of using cardinal directions would seem to have opened up their powers of perception.
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At least some Gurungi speakers may be able to consciously feel Earth's magnetic field.
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So what that means to me is that language can change the way you experience living in your body, not just your thoughts about the world around you.
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And Berlaine Co on Sevstack has an essay called Babailan Bai Bai Leng, The National Colonial Amnesia.
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And she writes about the Babailans from the Visayan Islands and the Catalonans in the Tagalong regions.
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They say these were women, sometimes men or queer individuals too, who embodied spiritual power.
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They weren't just priestesses.
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They were feared, respected, and untouchable.
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Many were women, but many were also effeminate men, and what we might now call transgender women, people who presented femininity in ways that held sacred meaning.
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In pre-colonial society, they weren't mocked or sidelined.
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They were central.
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And this, of course, reminds me of two spirits in Native American culture.
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Trans people have always existed, and there are multiple indigenous cultures throughout the world that have this deep, innate wisdom that that should be revered and not othered.
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But this essay says, colonizers didn't understand that.
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In their world, gender was binary, woman or man, nothing in between.
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So when they saw the violence leading villages and rituals while dressed in feminine attire, they saw a threat, a disruption to their system.
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And like so many things they didn't understand, they labeled it unnatural and sought to erase it.
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Now, I've been thinking about this quote from Kenneth Hale, who's a linguist at MIT.
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And he says, losing a language is like dropping a bomb on a museum.
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And when I first read that, it rang as true.
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But I think talking through all of this, it's clear to me that language is much more than that.
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Language is a somatic, bodily thing.
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And when I think about a museum, I think about archival, I think about display.
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I don't necessarily think about the lived bodily experience.
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Whether that's the experience of feeling the gravitational pull of the earth on your body,
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or feeling what it is to be a trans person that's not only accepted by the language that's being used, but is centralized in it.
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Going back to the article about the Babailans, they say the Babailan carried identity not just in words, but in gesture, song, and ritual.
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These were embodied truths, not textbooks.
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Indigenous memory was, and still is, a full-body practice.
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And that reminds me of something
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that was said at the end of the essay about how our internet niche subcultures are fracturing the English language.
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And the solution that that essay put forward for
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that problem was basically that we need to get reconnected with human touch in order to bridge
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that gap being created by all of these internet niche subculture discord languages
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that are ultimately isolating us from the community right in front of us.
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And when I first read that conclusion, I was like, hmm, I don't know how convincing that is for me.
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Like, I don't know.
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For some reason, I was just like, okay, so we're not understanding each other's use of the English language, so we should all touch each other more?
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Like, it just wasn't clicking to me.
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And I'm still not totally sure what the answer to that problem is.
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But I think something I think I'm hoping to do is listen more to Indigenous wisdom so that I can,
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like, I don't know, embody a worldview beyond what the English language automatically gives me.
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And I'm just going to go back to Braiding Sweetgrass for a second
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and read the end of the chapter on the grammar of animacy.
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She says, I'm not advocating that we all learn Pottawatomie or Hopi or Seminole, even if we could.
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Immigrants came to these shores bearing a legacy of languages all to be cherished, but to become native to this place, if we are to survive here and our neighbors too,
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Our work is to learn to speak the grammar of animacy so
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that we might truly be at home I remember the words
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of bill tall bull a cheyenne elder as a young person I spoke to him with a heavy heart lamenting
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that I had no native language with which to speak to the plants
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and the places that I love They love to hear the old language.
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He said it's true
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But he said with fingers on his lips You don't have to speak it here if you speak it here.
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He said patting his chest They will hear you
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and I think that's a good thing to end on because I don't think that my point is you know, all of us need to go and learn a bunch of languages.
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I mean, if you have the ability and the time to do that right now, that's amazing.
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But I know a lot of people who are kind of in survival mode
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and maybe the last thing on your mind is like going and learning languages.
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But if that is the case for you, I still think even if you don't know a different language or you don't have time to learn one,
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there's a lot that can be gained from listening to and centering Indigenous wisdom.
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Not to go back to using the time is money metaphor, but if you are feeling a bit too time poor to pour into learning a new language,
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maybe you can just start listening for ways
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that you can use the language that you already speak
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and ways that bring you back into your own body and back into communion with the place around you.
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We don't all have to live in the clouds and forget how to talk to each other.
352
Anyways, this was a lot and I am sweating.
353
So glad that I just told you that.
354
that's all I have today.
355
I feel like this topic was maybe a little bit heavier than usual, but I had a lot of fun researching about it.
356
I feel like I learned so much, and I hope you did too, and I will talk to you in two weeks.
357
Bye.
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Why Practice Speaking with This Video?
This video is a goldmine for English learners looking to improve English pronunciation and master natural conversation flow. The host, Anna, speaks in a warm, conversational tone—perfect for shadowing (or "shadowspeaks") practice. By mimicking her pace, pauses, and emphasis, you’ll learn to sound more like a native. Plus, she dives into thought-provoking topics, giving you real-world context to practice expressing complex ideas. Whether you’re a beginner or intermediate learner, this video helps you move beyond memorization and into authentic communication.
Grammar & Expressions in Context
Let’s break down key structures Anna uses:
- "I had kind of a hard time with this one": The phrase "kind of" softens statements, a common casual English trait. Practice using it to sound less formal.
- "there were a couple of little curiosities that were making me interested": The past continuous ("were making") shows ongoing action in the past. Notice how it adds depth to storytelling.
- "I hope one day that I can really seriously immerse myself": The structure "I hope + [clause]" is essential for expressing wishes. Try replacing "immerse myself" with your own goals (e.g., "speak fluently").
Common Pronunciation Traps
Watch out for these tricky words:
- "linguistics": Pronounce it "lin-GWIS-tiks" (not "lin-GWIS-tics" with a hard "k"). Stress the second syllable.
- "compartmentalize": Break it into "com-par-tmen-tal-ize" to avoid tripping over the middle syllables. Keep the "t" soft.
- "imaginación" (from the Spanish example): Even when discussing other languages, Anna’s English pronunciation of loanwords is clear. Notice how she emphasizes the "a" in "i-ma-gi-NA-ción."
Practicing with this video? Try "shadow speak"—repeat Anna’s lines immediately after her, matching her tone and rhythm. It’s a proven way to boost fluency and confidence. Ready to start? Hit play and let the learning begin!
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | have really been trying · I've been trying · have been paying |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | I've made · haven't been · haven't heard |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | was born · have been tracked · be called |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | pages, which was · people who still · people who write |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.