Skip to main content

Home/ TOK@ISPrague/ Group items tagged Language

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Lawrence Hrubes

What is history? A critical review of E. H. Carr | DIBAJ - 0 views

  • E. H. Carr in 1961 delivered a series of six lectures at Cambridge University examining the question “What is history?”
  • He, however, argues that historians are susceptible to bias since every person is born into a society and invariably they are moulded by it through its environment and language as such their interpretation of history will be subjective to meet the criteria of their own culture; hence, Carr describes the historian as “the conscious or unconscious spokesman of the society to which he belongs.” Consequently, it is argued history is perceived through the environment in which the historian lives.
  • However, Carr differs from his predecessors in his definition of what constitutes as historical facts. He claims in his book that facts only become historical facts when the historian selects it to be as such.
markfrankel18

Debate Erupts in California Over Curriculum on India's History - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Victors are said to write history. But in California, history is being written by a committee that is at the center of a raging debate over how to tell the story of South Asia as it tries to update textbooks and revise curriculums for Grades 6 and 7.The dispute centers on whether the region that includes modern-day India, Pakistan and Nepal should be referred to as India or as South Asia, to represent the plurality of cultures there — particularly because India was not a nation-state until 1947. It also touches on how the culture of the region is portrayed, including women’s role in society and the vestiges of the caste system.
Lawrence Hrubes

Period. Full Stop. Point. Whatever It's Called, It's Going Out of Style - The New York ... - 0 views

  • The period — the full-stop signal we all learn as children, whose use stretches back at least to the Middle Ages — is gradually being felled in the barrage of instant messaging that has become synonymous with the digital age
  • Increasingly, says Professor Crystal, whose books include “Making a Point: The Persnickety Story of English Punctuation,” the period is being deployed as a weapon to show irony, syntactic snark, insincerity, even aggression
  • At the same time, he said he found that British teenagers were increasingly eschewing emoticons and abbreviations such as “LOL” (laughing out loud) or “ROTF” (rolling on the floor) in text messages because they had been adopted by their parents and were therefore considered “uncool”
  •  
    note: this article was written with an intentional lack of periods
markfrankel18

How 'Concept Creep' Made Americans So Sensitive to Harm - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • In “Concept Creep: Psychology's Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology,” Haslam argues that concepts like abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice, “now encompass a much broader range of phenomena than before,”expanded meanings that reflect “an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm.”
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Culture - English has 3,000 words for being drunk - 1 views

  • ‘Booze’ was once a popular term in the slang or ‘cant’ of the criminal underworld, which may explain its rebellious overtones today. But whether formally or informally, when it comes to alcohol, English has been hard at work for centuries.  ‘Alcohol’ itself is 800 years old, taken from the Spanish Arabic al-kuḥul which meant ‘the kohl’, linking it with the same black eye cosmetic you’ll find on any modern make-up counter.
markfrankel18

Links 2013 - 1 views

  •  
    I love his Reading Tips in the sidebar!
Lawrence Hrubes

The Wrong Way to Teach Grammar - Michelle Navarre Cleary - The Atlantic - 0 views

  •  
    "A century of research shows that traditional grammar lessons-those hours spent diagramming sentences and memorizing parts of speech-don't help and may even hinder students' efforts to become better writers. Yes, they need to learn grammar, but the old-fashioned way does not work."
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Future - How to learn like a memory champion - 1 views

  • As Cooke first set out developing his idea, he turned to his former classmate at Oxford University, Princeton neuroscientist Greg Detre, to help update his tried-and-tested techniques with the latest understanding of memory. Together, they came up with some basic principles that would guide Memrise’s progress over the following years. The first is the idea of “elaborative” learning – in which you try to give extra meaning to a fact to try to get it to stick in the mind. These “mems”, as the team call them, are particularly effective if they tickle the funny bone as well as the synapses – and so for each fact that you want to learn, you are encouraged to find an amusing image or phrase that helps plant the memory in your mind.
  • Unsurprisingly, it was the friendly competition element that captured the attention of Traynor's primary school pupils learning Spanish. “As soon as they come into the classroom, they want to see where they are on the leader board,” he says. And there are other advantages. Each lesson, Traynor tends to split the class into two – while half are doing the “spade work” on vocabulary learning on the school's iPads, he can teach the others – before the two halves switch over. By working with these smaller groups, he can then give more individual attention to each child's understanding of the grammar.Even more powerfully, Traynor recently began encouraging his class to record and upload their pronunciation of the words onto the app – which they can then share with their classmates using the course. The sound of their classmates seems to have spurred on their enthusiasm, says Traynor. “They're constantly trying to work out whose voice they're hearing,” he says. “So they're giving more attention to the different sounds. I think it's improved their speaking and listening dramatically.”Although most courses on Memrise deal with foreign languages, teachers in other subjects are also starting to bring the technology to their classroom. Simon Birch from The Broxbourne School in Hertfordshire, for instance, uses it to teach the advanced terminology needed for food technology exams, while his school’s English department are using it to drill spelling. "The benefits for literacy can't be overstated," Birch says.
Lawrence Hrubes

Why Your Name Matters : The New Yorker - 1 views

  •  
    "We see a name, implicitly associate different characteristics with it, and use that association, however unknowingly, to make unrelated judgments about the competence and suitability of its bearer. The relevant question may not be "What's in a name?" but, rather, "What signals does my name send-and what does it imply?""
Lawrence Hrubes

How Y'all, Youse and You Guys Talk - Interactive Graphic - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  •  
    "What does the way you speak say about where you're from? Answer all the questions below to see your personal dialect map."
markfrankel18

Sea of Japan vs. East Sea: The school textbook change that has Japan furious at Virginia. - 1 views

  • he Washington Post reports that an “obscure textbook bill that elicited threats from Japan and drew busloads of Korean activists to the Capitol was headed Wednesday to Gov. Terry McAuliffe for his signature.” The bill requires all new Virginia textbooks to mention that the Sea of Japan is also known as the “East Sea.” McAuliffe promised to make the change on the campaign trail while attempting to win votes from Northern Virginia’s growing Korean community, who claim that the name was wrongly popularized while Korea was under Japanese occupation. It has predictably irritated Tokyo, with Japan’s ambassador to the U.S. warning that it could harm Japan-Virginia business relations. New York and New Jersey are reportedly considering similar bills.
markfrankel18

Why is the 'mor' in 'Voldemort' so evil-sounding? - The Week - 0 views

  • So what's the deal with "mor"? Is there something to the syllable that suits it for melancholy, darkness, and villainy? We have to be careful here. There are more words out there that have "mor" that don't carry such dark tones. The names Morgan, Maureen, and Maurice aren't so sinister (well, possibly excepting the case of Piers Morgan), and people just wanted more and more of Mork from Ork. So we can't say that this "mor" sound carries darkness and death wherever it goes. But we can say that it has some dark associations available if we want to use them. For starters, the Latin "mor" root (as in moribund and mortal and French words such as morte) refers to death; there is an old Germanic root mora for darkness, which shows up in words such as murky; our modern word murder comes from an Old English word morth for the same; and, of course, a morgue is a place where dead bodies are kept. That's enough to give a familiar ring. And every evil name that has "mor" in it adds to the weight of the association, especially when they're famous evil names. In fact, "mor" may be what is sometimes called a phonestheme: a part of a word that tends to carry a certain connotation not because of etymology or formal definition but just by association.
markfrankel18

Why Nothing Is Truly Alive - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • What is life? Science cannot tell us. Since the time of Aristotle, philosophers and scientists have struggled and failed to produce a precise, universally accepted definition of life. To compensate, modern textbooks point to characteristics that supposedly distinguish the living from the inanimate, the most important of which are organization, growth, reproduction and evolution. But there are numerous exceptions: both living things that lack some of the ostensibly distinctive features of life and inanimate things that have properties of the living.
  • Life is a concept, not a reality.
« First ‹ Previous 121 - 140 of 213 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page