Danes and Norwegians were better at listening to each other's speech. One possibility is that Danes might develop sort of a more empathy. So if you all the time have to pay more attention to what the other person might be thinking, it may actually allow you to be more empathetic. But we don't know for a fact so this is just a case. I've been very interested to see in recent years how big world events like Brexit, like the pandemic, like the rise of working from home has shaped linguistic trends. Every time there's a new thing to describe, we create a new vocabulary to describe it. Even Covid is a new coinage
Language is perhaps humanity's most astonishing accomplishment but one that remains poorly understood. On this episode of the podcast we were joined by Nick Chater, Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School, and Morten H. Christiansen, Professor of Psychology at Cornell University. Together in their latest book "The Language Game," they upend our traditional understanding of language, arguing that it's not based on a set of fixed rules, but on a constantly evolving series of flexible conventions. Our host for this episode was journalist Christine Ro.
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