From last week's Science Friday
You can probably recognize your friend's voice over the phone with just one "hello" -- but how? Several studies published in the June issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience try to tackle what we do and don't know about the sense of hearing. In this segment, we'll talk about what's going on inside your brain as it attempts to decode the spoken word.
Listen to the broadcast here. (It's on the top left of the page)
I just got done posting on my blog the five things UVSC needs to do in order to be taken seriously as a university. You can check it out in full here:
The 5 things UVSC should do to really become a university
One of the suggestions I put out there was the need for a greater focus on foreign language study:
With such a high percentage of returned LDS missionaries, UVU has one of the most bilingual college populations in the country. UVU should capitalize on this advantage by making foreign languages part of the core curriculum. Every student graduating from UVU should be encouraged to be proficient in another language.
But how do you get students to enroll in these time intensive classes? At BYU students can use language credits to satisfy math requirements. Imagine how many students would take 12 credits of a language in order to avoid passing Math 1050.
Tell me what you think of my ideas...and No Torben, this will not take effect before the fall.
The follow is a clip from Waking Life, a very enjoyable film by Richard Linklater. This specific clip is about language. Check it out.
The title of this post sounds like the setup to an extremely sophisticated joke, right? Sorry to disappoint. But really, though, echolocation and human speech have something in common: they are both controlled by FOXP2, the so-called "language gene." There's a fascinating post on Babel's Dawn today, discussing recent discoveries about FOXP2.
As it turns out, besides bats, humans have one of the most developed FOXP2 genes among mammals. No other primates compare. This enables us to produce and understand minute differences in sound, like the difference between sing and zing, which is not only a minute difference, but it's said and over with in a matter of milliseconds.
Bats still apparently have better sensorimotor coordination than we do, but our abilities are nothing to scoff at.
We've had a couple of recent posts on Language Scraps about Steven Pinker's new book (which I still haven't read). I ran across a brief but interesting article about it in Wired, though, with an engaging headline:
Holy @&%*! Author Steven Pinker Thinks We're Hardwired to Curse.
"Cathartic cursing," as Pinker describes in the article, is what we do when we hit our thumb with a hammer or slam our finger in the door, etc. And he says it's similar to, say, a dog's reaction if you step on its tail. I think we all "curse" in this sense, which is to use vocalizations to respond to the pain. Is whether we say fuck or fudge or fiddlesticks really relevant?
And what drives this? Is it related to pain sensation? I get excruciating suicide headaches that usually last several hours, during the peaks of which I have trouble remaining silent. Somehow, the seemingly unbearable pain is mitigated (at least in my mind) by making some kind of noise. Moaning, groaning, anything--just nothing that requires thought. Or is it that if I don't, the feeling of helplessness to ease my misery is too overwhelming? Is it psychological or physiological? I wonder.
In light of our discussion today:
Phronesis (Vol. XLV, No. 4, November 2000) pp. 284-305.
Simon Keller
There was once a BBC radio show on which celebrity guests were challenged to produce
spontaneous etymologies of common English words. A guest on the show is asked to explain the origin of the word ‘gold’. “Ah yes”, she quickly replies, “this word has its origin in the venerable custom of giving gold watches as gifts to retiring employees. When a ceremony was held to honour a retiring worker, the manager of the company would present him or her with a timepiece made of the as-yet-unnamed substance. As the watch was passed over, the manager would whisper in the ear of the former employee, ‘Gee, you’re old’. As time passed, the ritualised phrase was shortened to, ‘Gee, old’, and then, ‘Gold’. Eventually, people began referring to ‘gold watches’, and so ‘gold’ became the name of the material from which the watches were made”.
(Direct link to this full article in .pdf form)
From the New York Times:
Filed at 2:44 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON (AP) -- When every known speaker of the language Amurdag gets together, there's still no one to talk to.
Native Australian Charlie Mangulda is the only person alive known to speak that language, one of thousands around the world on the brink of extinction.
From rural Australia to Siberia to Oklahoma, languages that embody the history and traditions of people are dying, researchers said Tuesday.
While there are an estimated 7,000 languages spoken around the world today, one of them dies out about every two weeks, according to linguistic experts struggling to save at least some of them.
Five hotspots where languages are most endangered were listed Tuesday in a briefing by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages and the National Geographic Society.
In addition to northern Australia, eastern Siberia and Oklahoma and the U.S. Southwest, many native languages are endangered in South America -- Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil and Bolivia -- as well as the area including British Columbia, and the states of Washington and Oregon.
Losing languages means losing knowledge, says K. David Harrison, an assistant professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College.
''When we lose a language, we lose centuries of human thinking about time, seasons, sea creatures, reindeer, edible flowers, mathematics, landscapes, myths, music, the unknown and the everyday.''
As many as half of the current languages have never been written down, he estimated.
That means, if the last speaker of many of these vanished tomorrow, the language would be lost because there is no dictionary, no literature, no text of any kind, he said.
Harrison is associate director of the Living Tongues Institute based in Salem, Ore. He and institute director Gregory D.S. Anderson analyzed the top regions for disappearing languages.
Anderson said languages become endangered when a community decides that its language is an impediment. The children may be first to do this, he explained, realizing that other more widely spoken languages are more useful.
The key to getting a language revitalized, he said, is getting a new generation of speakers. He said the institute worked with local communities and tries to help by developing teaching materials and by recording the endangered language.
Harrison said that the 83 most widely spoken languages account for about 80 percent of the world's population while the 3,500 smallest languages account for just 0.2 percent of the world's people. Languages are more endangered than plant and animal species, he said.
The hot spots listed at Tuesday's briefing:
-- Northern Australia, 153 languages. The researchers said aboriginal Australia holds some of the world's most endangered languages, in part because aboriginal groups splintered during conflicts with white settlers. Researchers have documented such small language communities as the three known speakers of Magati Ke, the three Yawuru speakers and the lone speaker of Amurdag.
-- Central South America including Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil and Bolivia -- 113 languages. The area has extremely high diversity, very little documentation and several immediate threats. Small and socially less-valued indigenous languages are being knocked out by Spanish or more dominant indigenous languages in most of the region, and by Portuguese in Brazil.
-- Northwest Pacific Plateau, including British Columbia in Canada and the states of Washington and Oregon in the U.S., 54 languages. Every language in the American part of this hotspot is endangered or moribund, meaning the youngest speaker is over age 60. An extremely endangered language, with just one speaker, is Siletz Dee-ni, the last of 27 languages once spoken on the Siletz reservation in Oregon.
-- Eastern Siberian Russia, China, Japan -- 23 languages. Government policies in the region have forced speakers of minority languages to use the national and regional languages and, as a result, some have only a few elderly speakers.
-- Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico -- 40 languages. Oklahoma has one of the highest densities of indigenous languages in the United States. A moribund language of the area is Yuchi, which may be unrelated to any other language in the world. As of 2005, only five elderly members of the Yuchi tribe were fluent.
The research is funded by the Australian government, U.S. National Science Foundation, National Geographic Society and grants from foundations.
Following up on Scott's post last week about Steven Pinker's new book, The Stuff of Thoughts: Language as a Window into Human Nature, here's a link to the talk that Pinker gave at TED earlier this year, as a preview of his book. See what you think.
I haven't read the book, but this talk was interesting in light of the recent spat between Pinker and George Lakoff, based around a review Pinker wrote last year of Lakoff's book Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea, and Lakoff's response. Are Pinker and Lakoff really that far apart in their conceptualizations of how language and metaphor are linked in the mind? That's for someone smarter than me to decide, but you can check out some responses to the Pinker vs. Lakoff debate here, here and here. Or Google up some more.
I think it was the 3rd or 4th time that we met for our "Language" class...
We were talking about the specific realm/adaptation of language that humans have that no other living creature has. That is, namely, reflection and reference to past/future events rather than just copying or mimicking. Scott brought up the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and his concept of “The Mirror Stage”. I thought it was so fascinating. It reminded me of the ideas in a book that my friend gave to me last Christmas called “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid”, written by a man named Douglas Hofstader (he won a Pulitzer Prize for it). I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. Last night I decided to make a post on this blog about it, but I was having a hard time explaining the similarities that I saw. Then I thought “there is no possible way that I am the only person who sees this connection”, so I started searching online and found an article called “Towards a Theory of Conscious Art” by Robert Pepperell. I started to read the article and found this:
(Which appears in Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research (“Towards a Theory of Conscious Art” by Robert Pepperell) Volume 1:2, p. 117-134, 2003 Edited by Roy Ascott)
“8. Reflexive theories of consciousness:
Reflexive, self-reflecting or feedback-based models of self-consciousness, of course, are nothing especially novel in recent Occidental theories of mind. For Lacanian psychoanalysis the 'mirror stage' in childhood development is formative of the self-referential I; a theory based on observation of the pleasurable reactions of small children and certain apes when presented with their own mirror image (Lacan 1977). In Godel, Escher, Bach; Douglas Hofstadter (1980) discusses the application of what he terms 'Strange Loops' or 'Tangled Hierarchies' in modelling human thought and consciousness. Speaking from a position deeply rooted in AI research, Hofstadter draws analogies between the modes of recursion, self-reference and emergent complexity found in the works of Godel, Escher and Bach and the symbolic interaction of 'subsystems' or 'subbrains' in the production of mind. He concludes: My belief is that the explanations of "emergent" phenomena in our brains —for instance, ideas, hopes, images, analogies, and finally consciousness and free will —are based on a kind of Strange Loop, an interaction between levels in which the top level reaches back down towards the bottom level and influences it, while at the same time being itself determined by the bottom level. In other words, a self-reinforcing "resonance" between different levels—quite like the Henkin sentence which, by merely asserting its own provability, actually becomes provable. The self comes into being the moment it has the power to reflect itself. (Hofstadter 1980 p. 709)”
That is just the first two paragraphs of the eighth section of his article. There are twelve sections in his article which is about twenty pages long. The whole article is interesting, but those two paragraphs (and the whole eighth section) really applied to our in class discussions.
If you want to read the article or look at it more in depth here is a direct link to the .pdf file: robertpepperell.com/papers/Towards%20a%20Theory%20of.pdf
And here is the link to his (Robert Pepperell’s) general website (which gives access to many other articles written by him): http://robertpepperell.com
(cover of Hofstader's book)
(cool drawing of Lacan)
Article from TheRecord.com by Luisa D'Amato:
An article from Linguistic Society of America by Betty Birner:
Is it true that the language I speak shapes my thoughts?
People have been asking this question for hundreds of years. Linguists have been paying special attention to it since the 1940's, when a linguist named Benjamin Lee Whorf studied Hopi, a Native American language spoken in northeastern Arizona. Based on his studies, Whorf claimed that speakers of Hopi and speakers of English see the world differently because of differences in their language.
What we have learned is that the answer to this question is complicated. To some extent, it's a chicken-and-egg question: Are you unable to think about things you don't have words for, or do you lack words for them because you don't think about them? Part of the problem is that there is more involved than just language and thought; there is also culture. Your culture—the traditions, lifestyle, habits, and so on that you pick up from the people you live and interact with—shapes the way you think, and also shapes the way you talk.
(More...)
Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Until 2003, he taught in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and Slate, and is the author of seven books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate, and most recently, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. This photo is from the "silly" part of his Harvard website.
In the current New York Review of Books, Colin McGinn reviews Harvard professor Steven Pinker's new book. Some of the articles in the NYRB are are online; unfortunately, not this one. Here's a taste of the review:
After a discussion of how we know, without ever learning reasons, that while we can say both Hal loaded the wagon with hay and Hal loaded hay into the wagon, we can't say John poured water into the glass but not John poured the glass with water, Pinker concludes that the way we understand systems of verbs like these means that we
must possess a language of thought that represents the world according to basic abstract categories like space, time, substance, and motion, and these categories constitute the meaning of the verb. When we use a particular verb in a sentence, we bring to bear this abstract system to 'frame' reality in certain ways, thus imposing an optional grid on the flux of experience. We observe some liquid moving into a container and we describe it either as an act of pouring or as the state of being filled. . . . The grammar of our language reflects this innate system of concepts. As Pinker is aware, this is a very Kantian picture of human cognition.
And, voila, there we are right in the middle of the eighteenth century!
