The World Wide Web
The Reith Lectures
BBC
4.2 • 770 Ratings
🗓️ 5 March 1996
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This year's Reith Lecturer is Jean Aitchison, a Professor of Language and Communication in the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford.
In her fifth and final lecture, Professor Jean Aitchison looks at the possibilities and the pitfalls of the way we use language, and how it can shape as well as distort our view of the world. She examines how the huge choice of words and sentences available to us also sets up possible snares and how humans may be subconsciously trapped by their language.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Ruth Lectures. This lecture in the series |
| 0:05.8 | The Language Web, given by Jean Aitchison, was originally broadcast in 1996. |
| 0:12.3 | We human beings are odd compared with our nearest animal relatives. We've lost most of our |
| 0:18.0 | hair. We wear clothes. And according to the writer Mark Twain, |
| 0:22.2 | we're the only animal who blushes or who needs to. |
| 0:25.7 | But our oddest characteristic is our language. |
| 0:30.3 | Unlike animals, we humans can say what we want, when we want. |
| 0:35.3 | Alfred Burn the Cakes. |
| 0:37.2 | Amanda plans to breed bandicoots, |
| 0:39.4 | and Mermicolians intrigue me, |
| 0:41.7 | are all possible utterances. |
| 0:44.1 | Even though Alfred burned the cakes |
| 0:45.9 | over a thousand years ago, |
| 0:48.1 | Amanda's bandicoot breeding plans are in the future, |
| 0:51.3 | and Mermicolians are mythical creatures, |
| 0:54.0 | a cross between a lion and an ant |
| 0:55.7 | with sex organs the wrong way round. This open-endedness, the ability to talk about anything |
| 1:02.7 | at any time, is uniquely human. In contrast, many animals are limited in the signals they can |
| 1:10.0 | send. |
| 1:16.2 | One species of grasshopper selects between six possible chirps, meaning roughly, |
| 1:18.5 | life is good. |
| 1:20.4 | Get off my patch. |
... |
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