There's been a lot of debate as of late with regard to the benefits of knowing more than one language. We do quite well for translating text, but it's going to be very difficult to translate fun chip chat and conversation. They've never seen that there would be such high quality machine translation in our world. It hasn't been done yet; we're still working out how to finish our PhDs.
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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