The Ties Center in Kuwait recently offered a lecture on cultural similarities and differences. The lecturer was Dr. Teresa Lesher and I had the valuable opportunity to ask her comments on a theory to explain the cognitive differences between Arabic and English speakers. To summarize, the grammatical differences between us causes Arab speakers to order information and data in a more flexible order than those who speak English where there is a standard format: Subject-Verb-Object. As a result, English speakers enjoy a stricter and straighter chain of logic. But is the divide between minds greater than what we think?

We language the mind, our one and only vehicle to perceive life, to understand our desires and each other's ideas. Therefore, we can easily say, that in order to tap into cultural differences, we ought to diagram the relationship between different languages. The people of these languages make them meaningful through every letter they produce. However, it is the linguistic rules and regulations that shape their minds the way it is or to be more poetic, grammar is the operating system of the subconscious. It is safe to say, that the method of "hacking" cultural differences is to map grammatical differences between languages.

Oxford University stated, that like human genealogy, a language's ancestral tree can be traced back to its father's language, via decoding sound particles of a word formula form a certain language, as a blood sample, and then analyze its phonological and morphological properties (how it is said and how it is written). Then compare it with similar words from older languages in the archives. From this, they successfully track a language's family tree.

Researchers found all languages share specific family trees among them, even tribal clusters that parallel human families and tribes. For example the Italian language and its neighbors, the Spanish and the French language share Latin roots. On the other side of the world, Japanese and Korean share the exact "father language", ancient Chinese. Turkish and Tajik and Tatar are another example. And in terms of tribalism, the Indo European languages cannot be considered as a family, but as a tribe that stretches across continents. Logically, we infer that all mankind came from a single mother. A mother with a singular tongue. Bilingualism did not have a chance in a one person world.

Experts of various languages in the world, have compiled words in dictionaries and used the science of etymology (word history) to highlight "shared" words between languages. But a bolder attempt is to map grammatical associations between languages to decode our mental uniqueness from each other. We have succeded in figuring all our phonological similarities. But did not the same with our group. This why we still sing our issues to each others as cultures but not compute it is as it is. The example of simulating a Samsung android to a calculator mimics how people of different systems of cognition attempt to think about others.

It is not very futuristic to implement the science of Universal Linguistics to bridge minds. For example in Arabic, our subject can be in the end or in the middle of a sentence. Our verbs can host the "doer" and clarify whether it is a male or female, allowing the listener or the reader to feel an emotional trigger, whenever we want. In English, it is more mechanistic, everything has to be on time. I believe this is the only science that has a blue print for bridging minds.

By Jeri Al-Jeri