Unspeakableness
An Intervention of Language Evolution and Human Communication
A Project by Pei-Ying Lin
Trans-Language Communication - Recreating the Tower of Babel

This part of the project is to investigate how people can communication without actually understanding the languages, what happens when language no longer deliver the essential semantic information? Will we be able to communicate? Does it feel different?

Experiment One - Workshop of Japanese, Russian, and Hebrew

The participants where ask to speak a language other participants don't understand to discuss a 2 minutes film with the help of my simple emotion classification graph. They are allowed to write, but only in the languages others don't understand.

Experiment Two - The "Pingu" Experiment

The participants where ask not to speak any words but allowed to use none-sense "gibberish" to discuss a 2 minutes film with the help of my simple emotion classification graph. They are allowed to write, but only in the languages others don't understand. Interestingly, the participants find it frees them from the "proper" politeness distance, which brings the participants a lot closer that it generally will be.