I first encountered Boroditsky’s study on language 3 years ago when I taught an introductory epistemology course, Theory of Knowledge (TOK), for the first time. One “unit” in that course is Knowledge and Language, and the textbook recommended Boroditsky’s TED Talk to get students to start thinking about the effects of language of knowledge. While a lot of the examples overlap, there were some examples in Boroditsky’s article that were not present in the 14 minute TED Talk.
The first one that jumped out at me was base 10 and Mandarin (though Cantonese applies here as well). While like English there are the ones, the tens, the hundreds, and then the thousands, Mandarin has an additional “unit” or “place value” – wan (萬), the equivalent of ten thousand, which is the beginning of what I call “compound units.”
In English, what I call “place values” are every fourth digit: thousand, million, billion, trillion, and so on. “Compound units” are simply tens and hundreds; they get added on to the place value. For example, 10,000,000 has a “place value” of million and a “compound unit” of ten, combining to give ten million. Visually, the English number system lines up with the comma separators, allowing quick and easy identification.
Meanwhile, Mandarin is systematic in a completely different way. The aforementioned “place value” of wan has all possible “compound units” before it: tens, hundreds, and thousands. 100,000 is ten wan. 1,000,000 is a hundred wan. 10,000,000 is a thousand wan. Then, a new “place value” comes next: yi 億, and its compound units has all the place values before it: ten, hundred, thousand, and wan.
Speaking as someone born in Taiwan and moved to Canada at the eight and is multilingual (in terms of proficiency, English > Taiwanese > Mandarin, though I’m fluent in all three), visually I find the English system much easier to work with, and because of this, sometimes I have trouble code switching when discussing numbers with my family members. 100,000 for me is a hundred thousand, but the term “hundred thousand” isn’t used in Taiwanese or Mandarin, the proper way to express it is “ten wan.”
Boroditsky’s comment on syllables and memorizing numbers was one that wasn’t in her TED Talk and was something I thought about as well. Though most single digit English numbers (with the exception of zero and seven) is single syllable, every single digit Mandarin number is single syllable (for that matter, every “word” is a single syllable in Mandarin), and I always code switch to Mandarin whenever I memorize numbers. Curious if this gave me an advantage, I decided to test it out using the Human Benchmark Number Memory activity, and with only a single trial, I successfully memorized 12 digits when thinking in Mandarin while memorizing 11 digits when thinking in English, suggesting not a significant difference. That said, a single trial doesn’t lead to any valid conclusions, and there could have been patterns in certain stages such as repeating digits that made memorization easier.
As for the hour lecture, there are a lot of overlaps between that and the TED Talk, with obvious more detail in the former. For example, the memoirs of a Russian boy who learned French from his grandmother example wasn’t given in the TED Talk. Similarly, the videos of her studies on language and memory of who performed an action accidently is present in the lecture and not the TED Talk. One key thing missing from the TED Talk that was in the lecture was “the importance of what a thing is called.” Though she does not provide many examples there, one that is brought up in the TOK textbook is labelling groups as “pro-life” versus “anti-abortion.”
As a side note, I’ve come across the puzzle at the end of that presentation and never managed to solve it. That hint of needing pencil and paper makes me want to give it another try…