Group items tagged

Schoolhouse Rock is a series of educational music videos covering anything from math to history. Some examples include, "Three is a Magic Number," and "Conjunction Junction." The idea is that putting educational concepts to catchy tunes will enable students to learn/remember them more easily.

Every town has the same two malls: the one white people go to and the one white people used to go to. - Chris Rock translation without rhetoric: every town has 2 malls a good one and a junk one I know this sounds strange, but as a kid, I was really shy. Painfully shy. The turning point was freshman year, when I was the biggest geek alive. No one, I mean no one, even talked to me. -Jim Carrey translation without rhetoric: as a kid i was shy, but when I became a freshman no one talked to me because I was a geek

Almost every language on the planet includes words that sound like the things they describe. Crash, yawn, glug… speech is just full of these onomatopoeias. And because they have their root in real things they're often easy to identify. Even a non-native speaker might recognise the Hindi "achhee" (a sneeze) or the Indonesian "gluk" (glug). Because these onomatopoeias are so widely encountered, easy to pick up, and convey information might they be the first form of language? That's the argument presented in a recent paper published in Animal Cognition. It points out that our ancestors would have begun encountering more and more noises that we could repeat. Tool use/ manufacture in particular, with its smashes and crashes, would be a prime source of onomatopoeias. Mimicking these sounds could have allowed early humans to "talk" about the objects; describing goals, methods, and objects. Might handing someone a rock and going "smash" been a way to ask them to make a tool? Perhaps different noises could even refer to different tools. Humans are good at extracting information from mimicked sounds. These sounds also trigger "mirror neurons" - parts of the brain that fire when we observe other people doing something - allowing us to repeat those actions. Seeing someone hold a rock a certain way and saying "smash" could have helped our ancestors teach the proper way to smash. But the biggest benefit would be the fact that you can communicate about these objects without seeing them. Having a sound for a tool would allow you to ask someone for it, even if they didn't have it on them. Given these advantages, it's easy to imagine how evolution would have favoured people who mimicked noises. Over time, this would have driven the development of more and more complex communication; until language as we recognise it emerged. Following this narrative, you can see (or maybe hear) how an a human ancestor with almost no language capability gradual

This article explores the revival of Wampanoag (Wôpanâak)--an Algonquian language spoken by Native Americans living in Southeastern Massachusetts when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. The story of the linguistic reclaimation's told in Anne Makepeace's documentary, _We Still Live Here_.

Wow!

After analyzing the music of some of hip hop's biggest artists, from Eminem to Public Enemy, linguists at the University of Manchester in England noticed something pretty impressive. As it turns out, Grammy Award-winning rappers seem to have an intuitive sense for rhyme, using subtle rhyming patterns called half-rhymes (like "hop and "rock") much more often than traditional rhymes (like "cat" and "mat").

Kitty displays a slippery slope fallacy when she talks about them smoking, then assumes that Donna is dancing around topless then states that the basement is like Amsterdam. Red also makes a hasty generalization that the boys learned to smoke because they listen to the Beatles. His assumption is that all rock band members and their followers are hippies and pot heads.

NPR's Jasmine Garsd, cohost of Alt.Latino, NPR's weekly music podcast, speaks re: indigenous lyrics and music sung in indigenous languages, fused to Western idioms like hip-hop and electronica. The show itself, featuring artists who showcase their musical talents in indigenous languages from Mapuche to Tzotzil, Guarani and Quechua, can be found at this link: http://www.npr.org/blogs/altlatino/2015/03/05/390934624/hear-6-latin-american-artists-who-rock-in-indigenous-languages

Courtesy the New York Times Magazine: thoughtful essays on what language reveals about our moment by rotating columnists Virginia Heffernan, Colson Whitehead, Amanda Hess, Michael Pollan, and others. Some sample titles: "The Underground Art of the Insult", "How `Flawless' Became a Feminist Declaration", "How Rock Star Became a Business Buzzword," "When You `Literally Can't Even' Understand Your Teenager."

This was a study done on university students that tested the effects of different kinds of music on cognitively demanding tasks (math problems). The results showed that people who were in silence scored much higher than those who listened to music. It also showed no significant difference between heavy-rock and piano music.

For 30 years, Robert Siegel has pretty much been the voice of All Things Considered. He steps down from the host chair on Jan. 5, 2018. During his career, one of the recurrent themes of his reporting has been language - and how we speak. This article documents several of Robert Siegel's language-related stories, including a 1993 article on "uptalk," an interview with a voice coach who teaches rock stars to scream without shredding their vocal cords, an interview with sociolinguist William Labov on New York accents, and Donald Trump's vocabulary and language.