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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. "
markfrankel18

What Elvish, Klingon, and Dothraki Reveal about Real Language & the Essence of Human Co... - 1 views

www.brainpickings.org/...john-mcwhorter-ted-ed

TOK language

shared by markfrankel18 on 28 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Language, Darwin believed, was not a conscious invention but a phenomenon “slowly and unconsciously developed by many steps.” But what makes a language a language? In this short animation from TED Ed, linguist John McWhorter, author of the indispensable The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language (public library), explores the fascinating world of fantasy constructed languages — known as conlangs — from Game of Thrones’ Dothraki to Avatar’s Na’vi to Star Trek’s Klingon to Lord of the Rings’ Elvish. Though fictional, these conlangs reveal a great deal about the fundamentals of real human communication and help us understand the essential components of a successful language — extensive vocabulary, consistent grammar rules but peppered with exceptions, and just the right amount of room for messiness and evolution.
markfrankel18

Language and Morality: How Foreign Speech Influences Choice - 4 views

www.scienceworldreport.com/...n-speech-influences-choice.htm

TOK ethics language

shared by markfrankel18 on 30 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • A recent study shows that using a foreign language can help many take a more utilitarian approach to moral dilemmas
  • According to research conducted by psychologists at the University of Chicago and Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, they discovered that many who regularly use a foreign language also take a relatively utilitarian approach to moral dilemmas. Even more interesting, researchers discovered that this same response held true when an emotionally difficult outcome was involved--one that could even involve the sacrifice of another life or the person making the decision.
  • "People are less afraid of losses, more willing to take risks and much less emotionally-connected when thinking in a foreign language," said co-author Sayuri Hayakawa, a UChicago doctoral student in psychology, via the release. She concludes the study by stressing on the importance of language. "You learn your native language as a child and it is part of your family and your culture," she said. "You probably learn foreign languages in less emotional settings like a classroom and it takes extra effort. The emotional content of the language is often lost in translation."
markfrankel18

5 examples of how the languages we speak can affect the way we think | TED Blog - 3 views

blog.ted.com/...ak-can-affect-the-way-we-think

TOK language psychology economics perception

shared by markfrankel18 on 28 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Is there a connection between language and how we think and behave? In particular, Chen wanted to know: does our language affect our economic decisions? Chen designed a study — which he describes in detail in this blog post — to look at how language might affect individual’s ability to save for the future. According to his results, it does — big time.
  • Using vast inventories of data and meticulous analysis, Chen found that huge economic differences accompany this linguistic discrepancy. Futureless language speakers are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers.
  • But that’s only the beginning. There’s a wide field of research on the link between language and both psychology and behavior. Here, a few fascinating examples:
Lawrence Hrubes

Can Dying Languages Be Saved? - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...a-loss-for-words

language culture indigenous knowledge systems

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 29 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • There are approximately seven billion inhabitants of earth. They conduct their lives in one or several of about seven thousand languages—multilingualism is a global norm. Linguists acknowledge that the data are inexact, but by the end of this century perhaps as many as fifty per cent of the world’s languages will, at best, exist only in archives and on recordings. According to the calculations of the Catalogue of Endangered Languages (ELCat)—a joint effort of linguists at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, and at the University of Eastern Michigan—nearly thirty language families have disappeared since 1960. If the historical rate of loss is averaged, a language dies about every four months.
  • The mother tongue of more than three billion people is one of twenty, which are, in order of their current predominance: Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Japanese, Javanese, German, Wu Chinese, Korean, French, Telugu, Marathi, Turkish, Tamil, Vietnamese, and Urdu. English is the lingua franca of the digital age, and those who use it as a second language may outnumber its native speakers by hundreds of millions. On every continent, people are forsaking their ancestral tongues for the dominant language of their region’s majority. Assimilation confers inarguable benefits, especially as Internet use proliferates and rural youth gravitate to cities. But the loss of languages passed down for millennia, along with their unique arts and cosmologies, may have consequences that won’t be understood until it is too late to reverse them.
markfrankel18

A legal battle about the Klingon language could affect the future of computer programmi... - 0 views

qz.com/...future-of-computer-programming

TOK language

shared by markfrankel18 on 11 May 16 - No Cached
  • In a document written partly in Klingon, the society argued that while Paramount commissioned the creation of the language in 1984 from linguist Marc Okrand, the language “has taken on a life of its own.” There are groups of fans whose only shared language is Klingon. People have tried to raise children as native Klingon speakers. If a language is copyrighted, the group argued, then all ideas subsequently expressed in it could be too. Owning a language would mean having the right to block any future work in that language.
Lawrence Hrubes

A world empire by other means - www.economist.com - 0 views

www.readability.com/...e1prrjxq

TOK language English globalization protectionism extinction

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 23 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 23 Dec 13
     
    "IT IS everywhere. Some 380m people speak it as their first language and perhaps two-thirds as many again as their second. A billion are learning it, about a third of the world's population are in some sense exposed to it and by 2050, it is predicted, half the world will be more or less proficient in it. It is the language of globalisation-of international business, politics and diplomacy. It is the language of computers and the Internet. It is now the global language. How come? Not because English is easy."
markfrankel18

There is no language instinct - Vyvyan Evans - Aeon - 0 views

aeon.co/...there-is-no-language-instinct

TOK language chomsky

shared by markfrankel18 on 06 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Chomsky’s idea dominated the science of language for four decades. And yet it turns out to be a myth. A welter of new evidence has emerged over the past few years, demonstrating that Chomsky is plain wrong.
  • How much sense does it make to call whatever inborn basis for language we might have an ‘instinct’? On reflection, not much.
  • If our knowledge of the rudiments of all the world’s 7,000 or so languages is innate, then at some level they must all be the same. There should be a set of absolute grammatical ‘universals’ common to every one of them. This is not what we have discovered.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • In a 2002 version, Chomsky and colleagues at Harvard proposed that perhaps all that is unique to the human language capability is a general-purpose computational capacity known as ‘recursion’.
  • While the human brain does exhibit specialisation for processing different genres of information, such as vision, there appears not to be a dedicated spot specialised just for language.
  • And indeed, we now believe that several of Chomsky’s evolutionary assumptions were incorrect.
  • we don’t have to assume a special language instinct; we just need to look at the sorts of changes that made us who we are, the changes that paved the way for speech.
Lawrence Hrubes

Why Save a Language? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...why-save-a-language.html

TOK language culture diversity indigenous knowledge systems

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 06 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Certainly, experiments do show that a language can have a fascinating effect on how its speakers think. Russian speakers are on average 124 milliseconds faster than English speakers at identifying when dark blue shades into light blue. A French person is a tad more likely than an Anglophone to imagine a table as having a high voice if it were a cartoon character, because the word is marked as feminine in his language.This is cool stuff. But the question is whether such infinitesimal differences, perceptible only in a laboratory, qualify as worldviews — cultural standpoints or ways of thinking that we consider important. I think the answer is no.
  • Yet because language is so central to being human, to have a language used only with certain other people is a powerful tool for connection and a sense of community. Few would deny, for example, that American Jews who still speak Yiddish in the home are a tighter-knit community, less assimilated into Anglophone American life and less at odds with questions about Jewish identity, than Jews who speak only English.
  • For example, whether or not it says anything about how its speakers think, the fact that there is a language in New Guinea that uses the same word for eat, drink and smoke is remarkable in itself. Another New Guinea language is Yeli Dnye, which not only has 90 sounds to English’s 44, but also has 11 different ways to say “on” depending on whether something is horizontal, vertical, on a point, scattered, attached and more. And there is Berik, where you have to change the verb to indicate what time of day something happened. As with any other feature of the natural world, such variety tests and expands our sense of the possible, of what is “normal.”
markfrankel18

Thinking in a Foreign Language Makes Decisions More Rational | Wired Science | Wired.com - 5 views

www.wired.com/...language-and-bias

TOK Language psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 30 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language. A series of experiments on more than 300 people from the U.S. and Korea found that thinking in a second language reduced deep-seated, misleading biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived.
  • it’s plausible that the cognitive demands of thinking in a non-native, non-automatic language would leave people with little leftover mental horsepower, ultimately increasing their reliance on quick-and-dirty cogitation. Equally plausible, however, is that communicating in a learned language forces people to be deliberate, reducing the role of potentially unreliable instinct. Research also shows that immediate emotional reactions to emotively charged words are muted in non-native languages, further hinting at deliberation.
  • The researchers believe a second language provides a useful cognitive distance from automatic processes, promoting analytical thought and reducing unthinking, emotional reaction.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - China: Stroke patient loses Chinese language ability - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...s-news-from-elsewhere-31114123

TOK language memory brain

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • An elderly Chinese woman is only able to speak English after suffering a stroke, it's been reported. Liu Jaiyu, a 94-year-old former English teacher, has found herself no longer able to speak Chinese after parts of her brain relating to native language were damaged by a cerebral infarction, the local Hunan TV reports. Television pictures show her in bed, answering simple questions in English, which means the nursing staff are having to brush up on their language skills. "She greets me in the morning using English, after she's eaten her meals in the afternoon she uses English," one nurse tells the TV. "My memory of the language isn't too good, sometimes I don't understand what she's saying!" A doctor at the hospital says that Ms Liu is suffering from paralysis of all her limbs, as well as an "obstacle" to her language functions. "It seems the part of her brain responsible for her mother tongue has been damaged, however the part that uses English has been preserved," Li Yanfang says. There have been rare cases where patients develop a different accent after a stroke, migraine or head trauma. But Ms Liu's case appears different because she has apparently turned to an already-learned language. Experts say that the complex Chinese language requires the use of both parts of the brain, while English only uses one side.
markfrankel18

Evidence Rebuts Chomsky's Theory of Language Learning - Scientific American - 1 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...-s-theory-of-language-learning

TOK language Chomsky

shared by markfrankel18 on 11 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • Much of Noam Chomsky’s revolution in linguistics—including its account of the way we learn languages—is being overturned
  • research shows that young children use various types of thinking that may not be specific to language at all—such as the ability to classify the world into categories (people or objects, for instance) and to understand the relations among things. These capabilities, coupled with a unique hu­­­man ability to grasp what others intend to communicate, allow language to happen. The new findings indicate that if researchers truly want to understand how children, and others, learn languages, they need to look outside of Chomsky’s theory for guidance.
  • All of this leads ineluctably to the view that the notion of universal grammar is plain wrong. Of course, scientists never give up on their favorite theory, even in the face of contradictory evidence, until a reasonable alternative appears. Such an alternative, called usage-based linguistics, has now arrived.
markfrankel18

The Internet, where languages go to die? | Al Jazeera America - 0 views

america.aljazeera.com/...nternetdigitaldivideicann.html

TOK language internet

shared by markfrankel18 on 18 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Forget the triumphant universalism of the Web; 95 percent of languages have almost no presence online
  • What few acknowledge is that the online world — when compared with offline, analog diversity — is very nearly a monoculture, an echo chamber where the planet’s few dominant cultures talk among themselves. English, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic and just a handful of other languages dominate digital communication. Thanks to their sheer size and to the powerful official and commercial forces behind them, the populations that speak and write these languages can plug in, develop the necessary tools and assume that their languages will follow them into an ever-expanding range of virtual realms.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC World Service - The Why Factor, Swearing - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/p01j2vps

TOK language swearing

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 11 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 11 Oct 13
     
    "#*?@! %$&@*! Why do a few, select words have such power to shock and offend? With help from swearing historian Melissa Mohr, Mike Williams traces the history of taboo language from Roman times to the present day and hears how cultural taboos have shaped offensive language down the centuries. He talks to American psychologist Professor Tim Jay about why we swear and discovers that children start using profane language at a much earlier age than you might imagine. And he meets psychologist Dr Richard Stephens who persuades him to take part in two swearing experiments, one of them rather painful, with some surprising results. "
Lawrence Hrubes

How English Ruined Indian Literature - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-ruined-indian-literature.html

language culture India indigenous knowledge systems English

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 23 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • “English is not a language in India,” a friend once told me. “It is a class.” This friend, an aspiring Bollywood actor, knew firsthand what it meant to be from the wrong class. Absurd as it must sound, he was frequently denied work in the Hindi film industry for not knowing English. “They want you to walk in the door speaking English. Then if you switch to Hindi, they like it. Otherwise they say, ‘the look doesn’t fit.’ ” My friend, who comes from a small town in the Hindi-speaking north, knew very well why his look didn’t fit. He knew, too, from the example of dozens of upper-middle class, English-speaking actors, that the industry would rather teach someone with no Hindi the language from scratch than hire someone like him.
  • India has had languages of the elite in the past — Sanskrit was one, Persian another. They were needed to unite an entity more linguistically diverse than Europe. But there was perhaps never one that bore such an uneasy relationship to the languages operating beneath it, a relationship the Sanskrit scholar Sheldon Pollock has described as “a scorched-earth policy,” as English.India, if it is to speak to itself, will always need a lingua franca. But English, which re-enacts the colonial relationship, placing certain Indians in a position the British once occupied, does more than that. It has created a linguistic line as unbreachable as the color line once was in the United States.Continue reading the main story
  • That student, Sheshamuni Shukla, studied classical grammar in the Sanskrit department. He had spent over a decade mastering rules of grammar set down by the ancient Indian grammarians some 2,000 years before. He spoke pure and beautiful Hindi; in another country, a number of careers might have been open to him. But in India, without English, he was powerless. Despite his grand education, he would be lucky to end up as a teacher or a clerk in a government office. He felt himself a prisoner of language. “Without English, there is no self-confidence,” he said.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • But around the time of my parents’ generation, a break began to occur. Middle-class parents started sending their children in ever greater numbers to convent and private schools, where they lost the deep bilingualism of their parents, and came away with English alone. The Indian languages never recovered. Growing up in Delhi in the 1980s, I spoke Hindi and Urdu, but had to self-consciously relearn them as an adult. Many of my background didn’t bother.
Lawrence Hrubes

'Who Speaks Wukchumni?' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...who-speaks-wukchumni.html

TOK language indigenous knowledge systems

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 23 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Throughout the United States, many Native American languages are struggling to survive. According to Unesco, more than 130 of these languages are currently at risk, with 74 languages considered “critically endangered.” These languages preserve priceless cultural heritage, and some hold unexpected value — nuances in these languages convey unparalleled knowledge of the natural world. Many of these at-risk languages are found in my home state of California. Now for some, only a few fluent speakers remain.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Future - Languages: Why we must save dying tongues - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...y-we-must-save-dying-languages

TOK language indigenous knowledge systems culture diver

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 10 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Just as ecosystems provide a wealth of services for humanity – some known, others unacknowledged or yet to be discovered – languages, too, are ripe with possibility. They contain an accumulated body of knowledge, including about geography, zoology, mathematics, navigation, astronomy, pharmacology, botany, meteorology and more. In the case of Cherokee, that language was born of thousands of years spent inhabiting the southern Appalachia Mountains. Cherokee words exist for every last berry, stem, frond and toadstool in the region, and those names also convey what kind of properties that object might have – whether it’s edible, poisonous or has some medicinal value. “No culture has a monopoly on human genius, and we never know where the next brilliant idea may come from,” Harrison says. “We lose ancient knowledge if we lose languages.”
markfrankel18

Wikipedia China Becomes Front Line for Views on Language and Culture - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-on-language-and-culture.html

TOK china wikipedia language

shared by markfrankel18 on 29 Oct 13 - Cached
  • The Chinese-language version of Wikipedia has become more than an online encyclopedia: it is a battlefield for editors from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong in a region charged with political, ideological and cultural differences.
  • Wikipedia editors, all volunteers, present opposing views on politics, history and traditional Chinese culture — in essence, different versions of China. Compounding the issue are language differences: Mandarin is the official language in mainland China and Taiwan, while the majority in Hong Kong speak Cantonese. But mainland China uses simplified characters, while Taiwan and Hong Kong use traditional script. That has led to articles on otherwise innocuous topics becoming flash points, and has caused controversial entries to be restricted.
markfrankel18

What 'The Simpsons' Says About Ukraine's Language Divide : Parallels : NPR - 1 views

www.npr.org/...about-ukraines-language-divide

TOK language ukraine history simpsons

shared by markfrankel18 on 12 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • And though Kostin and most of the people in eastern Ukraine are native Russian speakers, he prefers to download episodes dubbed not in Russian but in his second language, Ukrainian. All his friends in the city of Donetsk prefer the version dubbed in Ukrainian. "They talk in Russian, they think in Russian," and even their parents speak only Russian, he says of his friends. "But Simpsons? They like in Ukrainian."
  • But Lykov says language in Ukraine has always been more a political tool of division than an actual divide. People in eastern Ukraine — especially those under 35, who came of age after the Soviet Union collapsed — like being bilingual, he says. "Unfortunately," he says, "the media likes to show that only Russians live here and only Ukrainians live in western Ukraine. Actually people here have no trouble understanding both languages. And Ukrainian is even funnier for Russian-speakers [because] it's got cleverer slang."
markfrankel18

How languages evolve - Alex Gendler | TED-Ed - 0 views

ed.ted.com/...-languages-evolve-alex-gendler

language TOK

shared by markfrankel18 on 27 May 14 - No Cached
  • Over the course of human history, thousands of languages have developed from what was once a much smaller number. How did we end up with so many? And how do we keep track of them all? Alex Gendler explains how linguists group languages into language families, demonstrating how these linguistic trees give us crucial insights into the past.
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