Group items tagged

"We've also had wars on drugs, obesity, idleness, poverty, oil-price speculators, science, saturated fat (part of the "battle of the spreads"), and Waitrose (the aggressor was M&S)... Then, of course, there's the "war on terror", George W Bush's response to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001."

"Brain scans of modern stone-tool makers show that key areas in the brain's right hemisphere become more active when they switch from making stone flakes to more advanced tools. Intriguingly, some of these brain regions are involved in language processing... 'Our study reinforces the idea that toolmaking and language evolved together as both required more complex thought.'"

Study examined the medical records of 648 Alzheimer's patients in Hyderabad and found that bilinguals developed dementia four to five years later than monolinguals. 

"Whether it is by random chance or selection, one of the things that is true about English - and indeed other languages - is that the language changes," said Joshua Plotkin, co-author of the research from the University of Pennsylvania. "The grammarians might [win the battle] for a decade, but certainly over a century they are going to be on the losing side." Writing in the journal Nature, Plotkin and colleagues describe how they tracked different types of grammatical changes across the ages. Among them, the team looked at changes in American English across more than one hundred thousand texts from 1810 onwards, focusing on the use of "ed" in the past tense of verbs compared with irregular forms - for example, "spilled" versus "spilt". The hunt threw up 36 verbs which had at least two different forms of past tense, including quit/quitted and leaped/leapt. However for the majority, including spilled v spilt, the team said that which form was waxing or waning was not clearly down to selection - meaning it is probably down to chance over which word individuals heard and copied. "Chance can play an important role even in language evolution - as we know it does in biological evolution," said Plotkin, adding that the impact of random chance on language had not been fully appreciated before.

British researchers say they have found 23 words that have persisted for a staggering 15,000 years. These "ultraconserved words" include some that you might expect (you, me, mother, man), others you might not (spit, worm, bark), and at least one somewhat heartwarming entry (give). Over the centuries, the words have retained the same meaning and almost the same sound. The team claims that's because they all come from an ancient "mother tongue" that was used toward the end of the last ice age, the Guardian reports. They assert that the ancient language eventually formed seven language families, which in turn formed the 700 modern languages used by more than half of the planet today. To find the ultraconserved words, linguists looked for cognates-words that have similar meanings and sounds in different languages, like "father" (padre, pere, pater, pitar)-shared by all seven of the aforementioned language families. They then translated the cognates into what they believed the cognates' ancestral words (known as proto-words) would be, then compared those. They ultimately found 23 that were shared by at least four of the language families, including one (thou) that was shared by all seven. Here are all 23 "ultraconserved words", listed by the number of language families in which they have cognates. 7 - thou 6 - I 5 - not, that, we, to give, who 4 - this, what, man/male, ye, old, mother, to hear, hand, fire ,to pull, black, to flow, bark, ashes, to spit, worm

Would be interesting to analyze each of these theories for their enthymemes

This article talks about how some World Cup games will be broadcast in pidgin for Nigerian and Ghana audiences. I find it fascinating that the world has become more friendly to pidgin and other "informal" languages. I wonder if Hawaii broadcasts and television shows will start to utilize more pidgin and Hawaii Creole English.

"Research suggests that bilingual people can hold Alzheimer's disease at bay for longer, and that bilingual children are better at prioritising tasks and multitasking." See also: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/02/100218-bilingual-brains-alzheimers-dementia-science-aging/

Ryan, you're the best!

When children start studying music before the age of seven, they develop bigger vocabularies, a better sense of grammar and a higher verbal IQ. These advantages benefit both the development of their mother tongue and the learning of foreign languages. During these crucial years, the brain is at its sensitive development phase, with 95% of the brain's growth occurring now. Music training started during this period also boosts the brain's ability to process subtle differences between sounds and assist in the pronunciation of languages - and this gift lasts for life, as it has been found that adults who had musical training in childhood still retain this ability to learn foreign languages quicker and more efficiently than adults who did not have early childhood music training. Humans first started creating music 500,000 years ago, yet speech and language was only developed 200,000 years ago. Evolutionary evidence, as interpreted by leading researchers such as Robin Dunbar from Oxford University, indicates that speech as a form of communication has evolved from our original development and use of music. This explains why our music and language neural networks have significant overlap, and why children who learn music become better at learning the grammar, vocabulary and pronounciation of any language.

President Joe Biden and Dr. Anthony Fauci mispronounced the new COVID variant at a recent White House speech, calling the variant "omnicron" instead of the Greek letter "omicron." However, linguists explain that this is an expected error, as it is common for humans to take words from other languages and 'nativize' foreign sounds to make it more natural-sounding in their mother tongue. The abundance of English words with the prefix omni- seems to serve like a magnet, drawing in speakers to the similar set of letters and tempting speakers to mispronounce the omi- prefix as "omnicron."

"Barack Obama's speeches are much admired and endlessly analysed, but, says Charlotte Higgins, one of their most interesting aspects is the enormous debt they owe to the oratory of the Romans"

Writer JRR Tolkien took bits of his favourite real-world languages and spliced them together. Listen carefully to the dialogue in the forthcoming movie of Return of the King and you might recognise some old English, a Welsh lilt here and there, and even some Finnish. "They are invented languages but they are completely logical and they're linguistically sound," says Fred Hoyt, a linguistics researcher at the University of Texas in Austin who also teaches a course on Elvish.

What makes a speech great? Is it the topic or the rhetoric? Here are some of the great speeches of the 20th century, however, one should ask why they were selected in this order and, more importantly, why only political figures were chosen.

There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called "continuous partial attention", severely limiting people's ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity - even when the device is turned off. "Everyone is distracted," Rosenstein says. "All of the time."

This article talks about hygge and what it means to Danes. It talks about how hygge has shaped policies in Denmark, notably its anti-refugee stance. The article talks about the explosion of popularity of the word.

I think it's inspiring that through changing our thought processes we can attract the energy we want in our lives. Manifesting has to do with the Law of Attraction - it's crazy that our subconscious desires can be brought forth without consciously doing anything. We're so powerful and we don't know it.

Though newspaper style guides attempt to steer writers and editors through the trickier waters of the English language and try to confer consistency in grammar, punctuation and spelling, their well-intended prescriptivism may result in confusion and controversy. Take, for instance, the term "actor".

Esperanto isn't common and only spoken by language enthusiasts eager to learn this language said to be the most accessible and easy to learn. However, Esperanto, unlike English, has yet to catch on and a significant reason might be that there aren't any nations/states already speaking and connected to Esperanto.