Professor Quippy: Talk Like Little Green Dude, We Do

Oh my freakin’ God, our brains are hard-wired to speak like Yoda.

For those of us in Western cultures who are familiar with the subject-verb-object construction of language (“I drink wine. ” “You swill gin.” “Undergrads chug beer.”) new research from the University of Chicago will blow your mind.

Susan Goldin-Meadow, a linguistic psychologist, and her team asked their subject to play charades, miming scenes on a computer screen.

As it turns out, this kind of non-verbal communication is constructed more like languages such as Turkish or Korean, which use the subject-object-verb construction. (“I wine drink.” “You gin swill.” “Undergrads beer regurgitate.”)

According to the New Scientist: “Goldin-Meadow argues that this kind of sentence syntax might therefore be etched into our brains. Languages that veer away from this form, such as English, must have been influenced by cultural forces.”

Incidentally, Goldin-Meadow and her team also discovered that we have an inherent loathing of mimes, and that all games of charades lead to the development of one of the players becoming a “charade Nazi” — forcing everyone else to continue playing until he gets one right. (Guilty.)

You charade Nazis will find at humor-blogs and alltop. You New Scientist story read here.