The Jim Rutt Show
The Jim Rutt Show
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EP 175 Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater on The Language Game

Posted

February 12, 2023

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Jim talks with Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater about their new book The Language Game: How Improvisation Created Language and Changed the World. They discuss the game of charades & its relevance to the evolution of language, the false myth of a pure language, language as self-organizing system, Captain Cook’s encounter with indigenous South Americans, pidgins & creoles, gesture & vocalization, language & tool construction, the communication iceberg metaphor, misunderstandings in relationships, the now-or-never bottleneck, language understanding vs language production, genetic capacity for sequence-action-sequence tasks, chaotic improvisation as the core, the complaint that the young are ruining the language, the unbearable lightness of meaning, the miracle of sloppiness, order & disorder, word order & frozen accidents, language evolution without biological evolution, ChatGPT as a demonstration of how far learning from experience can get you, a poetry Turing test, and much more.

Guests & Subjects Covered

Morten ChristiansenNick ChaterWorld TheyCaptain CooksSouth Americans

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EP 175 Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater on The Language Game · The Jim Rutt Show · Sentinel