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Lawrence Hrubes

What's in a Brand Name? - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...whats-in-a-brand-name

language emotion economics linguistic determinism connotation

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 11 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • There are various ways a corporate name can seem apposite. In the case of existing words, connotations are crucial: a Corvette is a light, speedy attack ship; Tesla was an inventor of genius. Made-up names often rely instead on resonances with other words: Lexus evokes luxurious; Viagra conjures virility and vitality. Bad names bring the wrong associations to consumers’ minds. In the nineteen-eighties, United Airlines tried to turn itself into a diversified travel company called Allegis. The move was a fiasco. No less an authority than Donald Trump (whose faith in brand-name power is total) said that the name sounded “like the next world-class disease.”
  • A philosopher called Hermogenes argues that the relationship between a word and its meaning is purely arbitrary; Cratylus, another philosopher, disagrees; and Socrates eventually concludes that there is sometimes a connection between meaning and sound. Linguistics has mostly taken Hermogenes’ side, but, in the past eighty years, a field of research called phonetic symbolism has shown that Cratylus was on to something.
  • Remarkably, some of these phonemic associations seem to be consistent across many languages. That’s good news for multinationals: research shows that if customers feel your name is a good fit they’ll remember it better and even like it more.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Over time, corporate naming has developed certain conventions: alliteration and vowel repetition are good. “X” and “z” are held to be memorable and redolent of speed and fluidity. The letter “x” occurs sixteen times as often in drug names as in other English words; “z” occurs eighteen times as often.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Culture - Eleven untranslatable words - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...03-eleven-untranslatable-words

language culture linguistic determinism translation

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 07 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • There is one clear difference, though: Iyer has not invented them. The definitions she illustrates – 60 so far, from 30 different languages – match The Meaning of Liff for absurdity, but all of them are real. There is komorebi, Japanese for ‘the sort of scattered dappled light effect that happens when sunlight shines in through trees’; or rire dans sa barbe, a French expression meaning ‘to laugh in your beard quietly while thinking about something that happened in the past’.
  • Iyer’s Found in Translation project will be published as a book later in 2014. She has been a polyglot since childhood. “My parents come from different parts of India, so I grew up learning five languages,” she says. “I’d always loved the word Fernweh, which is German for ‘longing for a place you’ve never been to’, and then one day I started collecting more.”Some are humorous, while others have definitions that read like poetry. “I love the German word Waldeinsamkeit, ‘the feeling of being alone in the woods’. “It captures a sense of solitude and at the same time that feeling of oneness with nature.” Her favourite is the Inuit word Iktsuarpok, which means ‘the frustration of waiting for someone to turn up’, because “it holds so much meaning. It’s waiting, whether you are waiting for the bus to show up or for the love of your life. It perfectly describes that inner anguish associated with waiting.”
Lawrence Hrubes

Joshua Foer: John Quijada and Ithkuil, the Language He Invented : The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...121224fa_fact_foer

TOK language linguistic determinism

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 19 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 19 Feb 14
     
    "Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like "knight." No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today. "Natural languages are adequate, but that doesn't mean they're optimal," John Quijada told me. Quijada had spent three decades inventing in his spare time. Ithkuil had never been spoken by anyone other than Quijada, and he assumed that it never would be. In his preface, Quijada wrote that his "greater goal" was "to attempt the creation of what human beings, left to their own devices, would never create naturally, but rather only by conscious intellectual effort: an idealized language whose aim is the highest possible degree of logic, efficiency, detail, and accuracy in cognitive expression via spoken human language, while minimizing the ambiguity, vagueness, illogic, redundancy, polysemy (multiple meanings) and overall arbitrariness that is seemingly ubiquitous in natural human language." Ithkuil has two seemingly incompatible ambitions: to be maximally precise but also maximally concise, capable of capturing nearly every thought that a human being could have while doing so in as few sounds as possible. "
Lawrence Hrubes

Actually, Gender-Neutral Pronouns Can Change a Culture | WIRED - 1 views

www.wired.com/...-pronouns-can-change-a-culture

language linguistic determinism gender

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 23 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • So this was the real test. Would native-speaker Swedes, seven years after getting a new pronoun plugged into their language, be more likely to assume this androgynous cartoon was a man? A woman? Either, or neither? Now that they had a word for it, a nonbinary option, would they think to use it?
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