Ernst Pöppel (Januar 2026)

When researchers with different cultural background work together they are necessarily confronted with a language issue. At present, we in our group come from China, Germany, Russia, Italy and the United Kingdom, but we all use  English for verbal communication.

Some of us are competent also in other languages like French, Japanese, Spanish, Latin or Ancient Greek. Do we actually speak the same “language” when we talk to each other? We cannot be sure.

We have to recognize that the words and sentences we use when we talk to each other have to be transferred from “thinking to speaking”; this is an active process in the brain, and whether our thought processes are reflected precisely in what we are saying is not at all clear. Then, what is heard has to be transferred from the “hearing” to thought processes, another neural activity characterizing the cognitive machinery. It follows: Do we really “understand” what somebody has said. What is “understanding” anyway? Are we possibly victims of a simulation of understanding?

“Understanding” is, thus, questionable if one communicates in the mother tongue, and even more if one communicates in a foreign language, in our case English, which is a foreign language to almost all within our group. A practical problem are often presumably simple translations. Certain words cannot be translated like the German word “Stimmigkeit” into English or Chinese. One may escape to the prosody introducing emotional tonality while speaking to save the semantics.

It follows we live in a “Tower of Babel”. Thus, we started a project with different research trajectories to get a better understanding of “understanding”.

Who are we? Elvira Barkhatova and Gleb Vzorin have Russian as their mother tongue, and this is Italian for Margherita Pellegrino and Matteo Sesia. Thomas Carey is bilingual with English and German. By far the largest group is Chinese with Yan Bao, Shuai Chen, Yu Gu, Yao Li, Xinyi Niu, Xinchi Yu, Dongxue Zhang and Chen Zhao, but is this actually a homogeneous group?

One aspect of the “Tower of Babel” is to contribute to advanced artificial intelligence. Large Language Models (LLM’s) start to dominate our written communication. How does the sphere of “automatic writing” influence the sphere of spontaneous speech? How is verbal communication with all its complexities reflected in artificial languages, if at all? Does “big data” solve the challenges of intercultural communication? Furthermore, the “Tower of Babel” is also of political importance. Do politicians in negotiations speak actually the same language?