language
aardvarchaeology | September 9, 2008We interrupt this broadcast to explain something to everybody who has ever used the expression "a homo sapien". Sapiens is not a plural. It is an adjective ending in an S, just like erectus, afarensis and neanderthalensis. (It means "wise".) You would never say "a homo erectu", right? Don't try to learn Latin from Del tha Funkee Homosapien.
aardvarchaeology | September 5, 2008Swedish has a number of subtleties designed to keep furriners from learning the language of glory and heroes™. A famous one is the genders of our nouns, where almost every one is either of our two neutral genders -- apparently haphazardly selected. Another one is certain non-trivial uses of the definite article suffix: you can't say "I'm looking for that record by Roy Zimmerman, you know", you have to say "I'm looking for that record-the by Roy Zimmerman, you know".
A particularly good thing we've got going is that we don't have any verb corresponding to "to put". Instead, everything you…
dmunger | August 29, 2008I've always been a fan of literary studies -- I was an English major in college and I continue to blog about literature on my personal blog. But when I first learned about the concept of alliteration (I must have been in middle school), I was unimpressed. Obviously making a poem rhyme requires some serious skill, since not just one sound but a series of sounds must be repeated at the same point in the poem's meter. Alliteration, by contrast, only requires the repetition of a single consonant sound at the beginning of a few words. Clearly, creating clever combinations of consonant sounds wasn'…
aardvarchaeology | August 15, 2008Noreen Malone at Slate explains why Georgia and Georgia are both named Georgia. Basically it's:
George means "ploughman" in ancient Greek
Saint George dies in AD 303
Part of Central Asia (Georgia) becomes associated with the saint for unknown reasons
Crusaders bring the cult of Saint George to Western Europe in the 12th century
Saint George becomes England's patron in the 1340s
King George II grants part of North America (Georgia) a charter in 1732
But what does this all have to do with the Georgics of Virgil, published in 29 BC? Well, the poetry cycle's overt theme is rural life and farming…
edyong | August 15, 2008Hey folks, I've got a feature article in this week's New Scientist, which is my second for the magazine. The article describes the story of FOXP2, the "language gene" that's not really a language gene.
The story started a few years ago, when a group of scientists led by Simon Fisher found that a single genetic mutation was responsible for an inherited language disorder in a British family called KE. The gene in question - FOXP2 - was quickly touted as a "gene for language" by an overenthusiastic and sensationalist media.
Since then, researchers have probed the true nature of FOXP2 using…
edyong | July 28, 2008
Simon Kirby and Hannah Cornish are watching evolution take place within the confines of their laboratory. But they are studying neither bodies nor genes; their interest lies in languages, and how they change over time.
Regardless of school lessons and textbooks, most of the features of the languages we speak are learned by listening to the words of native speakers. Their sentences convey their thoughts, but they also hint at the structure of the language they are spoken in. That allows people who are learning a new language to infer something about its structure by listening to the way its…
dmunger | July 3, 2008Have you ever seen Singin' in the Rain? One of the movie's most hilarious moments is when the beautiful silent movie star Lina Lamont is asked to start making "talking pictures." As soon as this gorgeous screen siren opens her mouth, the illusion of her beauty is shattered: her squeaky voice instantly transforms her from a glamorous leading lady into a cartoonish boor. Threatened with losing their box-office cash-cow, the studio chiefs frantically enroll her in voice and etiquette lessons, but nothing helps, and eventually they're forced to substitute the voice of the attractive and lovely-…
edyong | June 30, 2008If you picture a woman twisting a doorknob, all the elements of this brief event show up in your mind - the woman, the twisting action of her hand and the doorknob. But as I describe this scene and as you read it, the players are mentioned in a very strict order. The subject (the woman) comes first followed by the verb (twisting), and the object (the doorknob) holds up the rear.
These word orders are one of the most fundamental aspects of any language and one of the earliest that young children pick up on. The Subject-Verb-Object order of English (SVO) is typical of many languages including…
grrlscientist | June 23, 2008tags: language as bullshit, George Carlin, humor, comedy, streaming video
When I woke up this morning, I heard George Carlin talk about language on NPR. What's wrong with using simple, direct and honest language? He wonders. "It's getting so bad that any day now I expect to hear a rape victim described as an 'unwilling sperm recipient'!" [6:55]
aardvarchaeology | June 21, 2008
Looking closer at this cover of a Chinese pirate edition of Disney's 1937 animated feature Snow White, we find a couple of fine Engrish phrases.
"Latinum Edition" is pretty good. But wouldn't you agree that "Still the Fairest of the Mall" takes the cake?
dmunger | June 19, 2008One of the first steps to learning a language is figuring out where one word ends and the next one begins. Since fluent speakers don't generally pause between words, it can be a daunting task. We've discussed one of the ways people do it in this post -- they focus in on consonant sounds. Other researchers have found that we also focus on the statistical properties of language.
Certain syllables are likely to follow each other within individual words, but unlikely to follow each other between words. Take the phrase "between words." In English, within a single word we're much more likely to…
aardvarchaeology | June 17, 2008I have become increasingly fascinated with place names. The other day I bought my second copy of Svenskt ortnamnslexikon, "Swedish place-name encyclopedia" (ed. Mats Wahlberg 2003). One often-consulted copy is in my office, and I've missed it many times -- at home while reading or conversing, and particularly in the car when passing intriguing signposts.
Names are hardly ever nonsensical collections of sounds. We may not know what they mean any more, or if we know we don't give it much thought. (In my family, we're named He of the War God, Senior Imperial Concubine from Space, Name of God and…
dmunger | June 16, 2008Listen to this short audio clip:
The clip plays two notes that are two full octaves apart. That's a greater range than many people can produce vocally. It should be easy for anyone to tell the difference between these two notes, even when heard in isolation, right?
Not necessarily.
A team led by Ulrich Weger has found a scenario where people make systematic errors judging these two very different notes. While most people get the notes right most of the time, by introducing a wrinkle into the testing, Weger's team could reliably induce errors and slower response times.
They asked 20…
edyong | May 29, 2008Think of celery, an airplane or a dog. Each of these words, along with the thousands of others in the English language, create a different and unique pattern of activity in your brain. Now, a team of scientists has developed the first computer programme that can predict these patterns for concrete nouns - tangible things that you can experience with your senses.
With an accuracy of around 70%, the technique is far from perfect but it's still a significant technological step. Earlier work may have catalogued patterns of brain activity associated with categories of words, but this is the…
aardvarchaeology | May 22, 2008
I've posted a fine example of Ansiktsburk song lyrics before: listen to a song in a language you don't understand, and try to imagine that it is actually sung in your own language though with a funny accent. Then write down whatever words you can half make out. Thus the Swedish drinking song "Helan går" becomes "Hell and gore, shun hope Father Alan, lay!".
Now Paddy K directs my attention to a new permutation of this idea. Here's a piece of choral music sung in English in such a way that the real lyrics are difficult to make out -- and the ansiktsburk poet has set new English words to it.…
aardvarchaeology | May 10, 2008
My kid's spacy English writing assignment makes me so proud! He's nine, he's only been once for a few days to an Anglophone country, and we rarely speak English at home. Yet he seems to have picked the language up from on-line gaming, and he's long been able to read e.g. the Harry Potter books in English. With his permission, here are his ideas about space colonies.
I think that in the future those who want to will be able to move onto another planet, or into a space station. People will breathe using space suits, and at home they will have air inside their houses. They will get food by…
dmunger | May 1, 2008One of the amazing things about learning language is that children rarely hear language sounds in ideal acoustic environments. Maybe other people are talking in the background, or the dishwasher is running, or the TV is on. Yet somehow children they learn words just the same. By the time we're adults, we've become experts at filtering out irrelevant sounds and patching together meaning out of the cacophony of everyday life.
As one example, listen to this short clip of me saying the word "dinosaur" three times.
I edited the "s" sound out of the first "dinosaur," so you can clearly hear me…
purepedantry | April 23, 2008(I have been meaning to post this for about two weeks, so if it is a bit dated forgive me.)
Dyslexia is a learning disability characterized by slower reading skills acquisition, and it is associated with certain structural abnormalities in the brain. However, it turns out that different areas of the brain are affected depending on whether your language is alphabetic (like English) or symbolic (like Chinese).
Siok et al. present evidence in PNAS that English and Chinese languages utilize different brain systems and that as a consequence dyslexia presents differently in English and Chinese…
dmunger | April 7, 2008The fact that infants are able to learn language without any help from adults can sometimes seem almost miraculous. Not only do children learn to speak and understand language completely on their own, active teaching of language skills seems to make almost no difference in their ability to talk.
One of the first difficulties when learning a language solely from listening to spoken language is determining where one word ends and the next one begins. Native speakers of a language typically leave no audible space between words at all. Even "motherese" doesn't leave any space between words -- if…
aardvarchaeology | March 25, 2008
Childcare is a context where people from different class backgrounds come into intimate contact. Indeed, for as long as there has been childcare, this work has been done largely by working class women, even when the kids in question have been middle- or upper-class. There's a common literary trope where an upper-class young man has a warm "natural" relationship to his working-class nanny and a cold distant one to his blood mother.
I've blogged before about how academic middle-class ideals of gender homogenisation clash with more traditional views among working-class daycare ladies. And…