Was There an Ancient Language of Universal Symbols?

I stumbled upon this the other day and thought that I would point to it from over here on this blog:

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2007/06/was-there-an-an.html

The link is to a blog post about commonalities in petroglyphs found all over the world...(and an archeologist from BYU is mentioned).

Weekly rescrap 10/22/07—10/28/07

A busy Thursday in an overall slow week.

Tuesday:
-Torben made us wonder whether Chinese youth really get crazy English tattoos (answer: it's a spoof)

Thursday:
-Torben posted the story of war graves defaced with Nazi symbols
-Torben shared the connection between music and human speech
-Torben pointed the way to Glottopedia, a wiki-based encyclopedia of linguistics
-Torben stumbled across the Endangered Language Fund
-Scott wrote on pledging allegiance to the flag
-Rikker linked to Multibabel, a machine translation game of "telephone"

High-tech "telephone" game

Carl Tashian's Multibabel is like that game we all used to play in grade school. It takes an English sentence as input, and plugs it into the AltaVista machine translation tool to interpret it into another language, then back into English. It then plugs that result into another language, and translates that back into English. After five cycles of this (or eight, if you click the button to include Chinese, Japanese and Korean), it's pretty amazing what you end up with. I tried:

Languages Scraps is my favorite blog!
After round 1 (Japanese):
The language scrap is blog of my taste!
After round 2 (Chinese):
The language discards is my taste blog!
...
After round 8 (Spanish):
The strong languages are blog of the mine the pleasure!

Oh, the possibilities! (Or, Good contingency!, if you prefer.)

[Found via Notes from a Linguistic Mystic]

I pledge allegiance to the flag

Last night was "Meet the Candidates Night" for our hometown. Lyn, along with several other candidates, is running for City Council. A representative of the League of Women Voters ran the meeting, reading questions written by members of the large audience. Each candidate had 90 seconds to answer each question. It was a hurried but informative hour and a half. But the really interesting part came at the end when citizens had a chance to ask questions of individual candidates.

Let me get straight to the point, an ex-mayor's wife asked Lyn. There's gossip going around town that you won't salute the flag or say the pledge of allegiance. Is that true?

That's true, Lyn answered, and then explained her reluctance to swear allegiance to any symbol. I try to let my deeds stand for my commitment to this democracy, she said.

The explanation didn't seem to sit well, and certainly the gossip will have heated up by this morning.

I don't say the pledge of allegiance either, and while walking our dog this morning I reviewed my reasons:

1. I have seen Leni Riefenstahl's film "Triumph of the Will."
2. I have an aversion to the coercions of crowds.
3. I believe in the separation of church and state.
4. I don't believe that I or this country are "under God."
5. Loyalty oaths make me break out in hives.
6. I believe that symbols are only what we make of them, and I'd like to make as little of this symbol as possible, given its role in an often sketchy history.
7. I love Jimi Hendrix's version of "The Star Spangled Banner.

In fact, the last pledge of allegiance to the flag I enjoyed went as follows:

30 October 1996, Orem

A Cub Scout “pack” meeting in the church gymnasium. The boys and their Den Mothers are wearing costumes for Halloween. Bishop Gunderson, wearing a trim Scout uniform, asks us to rise for the presenting of the colors. He salutes smartly. The rest of us place our hands over our hearts. The first boy in the color guard wears a blue-and-gold Cub Scout uniform. The third boy is dressed like a bloody but elegant vampire. Marching between the Cub Scout and the vampire, carrying the flag, is my son Samuel. In the dress and wig his brother Benjamin wore last year. There are scattered chuckles as Samuel levers the flag into the heavy brass stand. I pledge allegiance, the vampire begins. Samuel rips the wig from his head and holds it over his heart. To the flag of the United States of America.

Endangered Language Fund

I stumbled across this site today and thought that I would post the link in light of our brief conversation about language preservation a month or so ago.

Glottopedia

Is Wikipedia not meeting your linguistic needs? Try Glottopedia, the free encyclopedia of linguistics.

Essential Tones Of Music Rooted In Human Speech

From Therapy Times:

The use of 12 tone intervals in the music of many human cultures is rooted in the physics of how our vocal anatomy produces speech, according to researchers at the Duke University Center for Cognitive Neuroscience.

The particular notes used in music sound right to our ears because of the way our vocal apparatus makes the sounds used in all human languages, says Dale Purves, the George Barth Geller Professor for Research in Neurobiology.

It's not something one can hear directly, but when the sounds of speech are looked at with a spectrum analyzer, the relationships between the various frequencies that a speaker uses to make vowel sounds correspond neatly with the relationships between notes of the 12-tone chromatic scale of music, Purves says.

The work appeared in a recent issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Purves and co-authors Deborah Ross and Jonathan Choi tested their idea by recording native English and Mandarin Chinese speakers uttering vowel sounds in both single words and a series of short monologues. They then compared the vocal frequency ratios to the numerical ratios that define notes in music.

Human vocalization begins with the vocal cords in the larynx (the Adam's apple in the neck), which create a series of resonant power peaks in a stream of air coming up from the lungs. These power peaks are then modified in a spectacular variety of ways by the changing shape of the soft palate, tongue, lips and other parts of the vocal tract. Our vocal anatomy is rather like an organ pipe that can be pinched, stretched and widened on the fly, Purves says. English speakers generate about 50 different speech sounds this way.

Yet despite the wide variation in individual human anatomy, the speech sounds produced by different speakers and languages produce the same variety of vocal tract resonance ratios, Purves says.

The lowest two of these vocal tract resonances, called formants, account for the vowel sounds in speech. "Take away the first two formants and you can't understand what a person is saying," Purves says. The frequency of the first formant is between 200 and 1,000 cycles per second (hertz) and the second formant between 800 and 3,000 hertz.

When the Duke researchers looked at the ratios of the first two formants in speech spectra, they found that the ratios formed musical relationships. For example, the relationship of the first two formants in the English vowel /a/, as in "bod," might correspond with the musical interval between C and A on a piano keyboard.

(More...)

War graves defaced with Nazi symbols

By Auslan Cramb, Scottish Correspondent

Last Updated: 1:40am BST 25/10/2007

The graves of British soldiers killed in the Great War have been covered with Nazi symbols in an act condemned as "appalling desecration".

Vandals painted swastikas and SS insignias on the headstones of 32 Scottish soldiers who died during the Battle of the Somme.

The attack caused thousands of pounds worth of damage at the Peake Wood Cemetery near Contalmaison, France, just days before Remembrance Sunday.

The cemetery marks the spot from which the final assault was made on Contalmaison on July 1, 1916, the first day of the battle on which nearly 20,000 men lost their lives.

The 16th Royal Scots, known as McCrae's Battalion, lost almost 75 per cent of their troops.

Many of them were laid to rest at the small cemetery, which records 103 fallen Allied soldiers.

(More...)

Chinese Youths Crazy for English Alphabet Tattoos

This is all a joke, but still funny and relevant :)

“The guy at the tattoo shop told me this means brave and proud warrior in English,” said beaming Beijing teenager Hao Tsang as he pointed to the letters GARF freshly inked onto his left bicep. “It’s perfect for me because I am very bold and confident, yet spiritual.”

Tsang’s friend Yuan Chi Hao also went under the needle for some English language characters. “Mine simply says FRUNK. The letters are so beautiful and flow so smoothly into each other. The word actually means old soul with young spirit in English. How cool is that?”

Apparently, very cool.

Throngs of Chinese youths are flocking to tattoo parlors looking to colorfully emboss their bodies with “meaningful” English language words.

“I couldn’t decide between CRYMPH or DLECH,” said Chengdu high school student Mingmei Lee. “I know they both mean beautiful flower dancing in the wind in American, but I can’t decide what looks prettier.”

This strange trend mirrors a popular body art movement in the US where many Americans — especially professional basketball players and young celebrities — get Chinese language characters tattooed on their bodies. Many believe the Chinese characters add an air of spirituality to their beings and help present them as enlightened individuals who respect and admire foreign cultures.

(More...)

Weekly rescrap 10/15/07—10/21/07

Monday:
-Torben rocked our wor(l)ds with Urban Dictionary, fo shizzle
-Torben posted on the campaign against signs with obvious warnings

Tuesday:
-Scott pondered another sign of intelligent life in Nevada... with alien jerky!

Wednesday:
-Rikker shared the classic tale of Ladle Red Rotten Hut (and other tales in the Anguish Languish)

Thursday:
-Scott linked us to further research on the language gene in Neanderthals

Saturday:
-Grabloid tagged LS with thoughts on graffiti