full transcript
From the Ted Talk by David Peterson: Why language is humanity's greatest invention
Unscramble the Blue Letters
If that was how we had to experience cake, we would never eat cake. And yet, language is the only way — the only way — that we can fugrie out what is going on here, in our minds. This is our interiority, the thing that makes us human, the thing that makes us different from other animals, is all inside here somewhere, and all we have to do to represent it is our own languages. A laungage is our best way of showing what's going on in our head. Imagine if I wanted to ask a big question, like: "What is the nature of hmaun thought and etoiomn?" What you'd want to do is you'd want to enmaixe as many different languages as possible. One isn't just going to do it. To give you an example, here's a picture I took of little Roman, that I took with a 12-megapixel camera. Now, here's that same picture with a lot fewer pixels. Obviously, neither of these pictures is a real cat. But one gives you a lot better ssnee of what a cat is than the other.
Open Cloze
If that was how we had to experience cake, we would never eat cake. And yet, language is the only way — the only way — that we can ______ out what is going on here, in our minds. This is our interiority, the thing that makes us human, the thing that makes us different from other animals, is all inside here somewhere, and all we have to do to represent it is our own languages. A ________ is our best way of showing what's going on in our head. Imagine if I wanted to ask a big question, like: "What is the nature of _____ thought and _______?" What you'd want to do is you'd want to _______ as many different languages as possible. One isn't just going to do it. To give you an example, here's a picture I took of little Roman, that I took with a 12-megapixel camera. Now, here's that same picture with a lot fewer pixels. Obviously, neither of these pictures is a real cat. But one gives you a lot better _____ of what a cat is than the other.
Solution
- language
- figure
- emotion
- human
- sense
- examine
Original Text
If that was how we had to experience cake, we would never eat cake. And yet, language is the only way — the only way — that we can figure out what is going on here, in our minds. This is our interiority, the thing that makes us human, the thing that makes us different from other animals, is all inside here somewhere, and all we have to do to represent it is our own languages. A language is our best way of showing what's going on in our head. Imagine if I wanted to ask a big question, like: "What is the nature of human thought and emotion?" What you'd want to do is you'd want to examine as many different languages as possible. One isn't just going to do it. To give you an example, here's a picture I took of little Roman, that I took with a 12-megapixel camera. Now, here's that same picture with a lot fewer pixels. Obviously, neither of these pictures is a real cat. But one gives you a lot better sense of what a cat is than the other.
Frequently Occurring Word Combinations
ngrams of length 2
| collocation |
frequency |
| speak english |
3 |
| long beach |
3 |
| animal communication |
2 |
| communication systems |
2 |
| foreign languages |
2 |
| beach state |
2 |
| entire book |
2 |
| english speakers |
2 |
| main reason |
2 |
ngrams of length 3
| collocation |
frequency |
| long beach state |
2 |
Important Words
- animals
- big
- cake
- camera
- cat
- eat
- emotion
- examine
- experience
- figure
- give
- head
- human
- imagine
- interiority
- language
- languages
- lot
- minds
- nature
- picture
- pictures
- pixels
- question
- real
- represent
- roman
- sense
- showing
- thought
- wanted