Article discusses the findings of researchers who've documented and categorized the utterances of the dying (morbid, but true!) Author Michael Erard notes that more research should be done in this area, because "Even basic descriptions of language at the end of life would not only advance linguistic understanding but also provide a host of benefits to those who work with the dying, and to the dying themselves. Experts told me that a more detailed road map of changes could help counter people's fear of death and provide them with some sense of control. It could also offer insight into how to communicate better with the dying. Differences in cultural metaphors could be included in training for hospice nurses who may not share the same cultural frame as their patients."
"... a group of us have been studying ways to make sense of large amounts of language data generated by people on the ground in Libya. ... You won't be surprised when I tell you what event coincides with the most obvious peak in positive emotion as well as in volume of tweet traffic: Gaddafi's death. Specifically, the vertical dashed black line marks the time when news of Gadaffi's capture and death were first made public."
Their report, Evolution of Sentiment in the Libyan Revolution, is here (PDF): https://webspace.utexas.edu/dib97/libya-report-10-30-11.pdf
R.I.P. to the understatement. Welcome to death by Internet hyperbole, the latest example of the overly dramatic, forcibly emotive, truncated, simplistic and frequently absurd ways chosen to express emotion in the Internet age (or sometimes feign it).
The trend toward hyperbole appears to echo a broader belief among experts that young women are its first adopters. One explanation for the use of hyperbole (OMG!) With the increase in digital, vs. face to face communication, we must come up with increasingly creative ways to express tone and emphasis when facial cues are not an option. There's a performative element to our social media interactions, too: We are expressing things with an audience in mind. Tyler Schnoebelen, a linguist and founder of Idibon, a company that uses computer data to analyze language, notes "Performance generally requires the performer to be interesting. So do likes, comments and reshares. Exaggeration is one way to do that."
The publication provides insight into how people in Iceland are recording their language to help keep it alive. Icelandic is suffering from something known around the world as "digital minoritization", where the overwhelming amount of online language use is in a different language (ex. English worldwide, pushing out smaller minority languages). It stresses the importance of the language to the country's identity and how the recordings will help keep the history of the country alive today.
This was a fascinating article that focused on one dying language in particular - Icelandic. The article details of how Icelandic is weakening to the point that some of Iceland's youngest children speak English without an Icelandic accent, and when speaking Icelandic, their syntax is unfortunately influenced by English. Further, the article detailed of how the Icelandic government aims to secure a future for this language, spoken by less than 400,000 people, through preserving it in a digital medium on an online database.
Just seeing a list of negative words for a few seconds will make a highly anxious or depressed person feel worse, and the more you ruminate on them, the more you can actually damage key structures that regulate your memory, feelings, and emotions.But negative words, spoken with anger, do even more damage. They send alarm messages through the brain, interfering with the decision making centers in the frontal lobe, and this increases a person's propensity to act irrationally.
Fear-provoking words-like poverty, illness, and death-also stimulate the brain in negative ways. And even if these fearful thoughts are not real, other parts of your brain (like the thalamus and amygdala) react to negative fantasies as though they were actual threats occurring in the outside world. Curiously, we seem to be hardwired to worry-perhaps an artifact of old memories carried over from ancestral times when there were countless threats to our survival.
An estimated 7,000 languages are being spoken around the world. But that number is expected to shrink rapidly in the coming decades. What is lost when a language dies? In 1992 a prominent US linguist stunned the academic world by predicting that by the year 2100, 90% of the world's languages would have ceased to exist.
An estimated 7,000 languages are being spoken around the world. But that number is expected to shrink rapidly in the coming decades. What is lost when a language dies? In 1992 a prominent US linguist stunned the academic world by predicting that by the year 2100, 90% of the world's languages would have ceased to exist.
Euphemistic language is the timeless enemy of anyone concerned with clarity. While everywhere, they tend to cluster within taboo subjects such as death, sex, and drugs - and giving people the axe, as no corporation would say. Few topics have accumulated as many euphemisms as the action called downsizing, making redundant, laying off, demising, and even absurd, clunky phrases like
Prior to the late 1880s, Chickasaw was the dominant language in Chickasaw Nation, in the southern part of central Oklahoma, yet today, only 65 fluent speakers, all bilingual in Chickasaw and English, remain. The death of Emily Johnson Dickerson, the last monolingual Chickasaw speaker, in December 2013 has spurred reflection on the erosion and future of this endangered language.
Swear words are just like "please" and "try" in this respect; only, instead of softening the edges of a request or statement, these make it sound rougher and more aggressive. If I say, "Someone stole my red guitar," all I'm saying is that someone stole my guitar, and that the guitar was red. But if I say "Someone stole my damn guitar," I am not saying that my guitar was stolen and that it was damned (even if I'm in a death-metal band). Instead, I'm saying that someone stole my guitar and that I'm pissed off about it.
Al-Sayyid is a village in Israel, populated by congenitally-deaf people. Over the past 75 years, the villagers have created an entirely new and unique language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL). The seeds emerged spontaneously among the first deaf residents and, three generations later, it has flowered into a complex language capable of expressing anything a spoken one can. Since its discovery by linguists in 2000, ABSL has captivated researchers driven by two fundamental questions: how did language emerge, and what can that tell us about the nature of the human mind? ABSL offers a unique opportunity to test a theory that has dominated linguistics since the 1950s. Put forth by Noam Chomsky, it claims that language is an innate and uniquely human trait, programmed into our genes. Children are born with a "language instinct" that compels them to effortlessly acquire whatever language (or languages) they are immersed in as toddlers.
Why do Jane Austen's literary works endure some 200 years after her death? The Stanford Literary Lab ran computational analysis on the words contained in Austen's work. Eschewing the fantastical and dramatic elements typical of novels both in Austen's lifetime and ours, Austen is more concerned with social realities and human nature. Her works display emotional intelligence; she employs more words about emotions and time, as well as abstract words connected to states of mind and social relationships.
The text exchange was unspectacular: a friend explaining a video that had been posted by a classmate to his Snapchat feed. Jordana Narin, my 20-year-old research assistant, was half paying attention, sitting in my living room working on a project, texting between breaks. "Omg literally dying," she typed back, not missing a beat.
What makes people who can fluently speak about six languages or more so special? One of the most famous hyperpolyglots in history Emil Krebs, had mastered 65 languages by time of death. After years of study, scientists have figured out that hyperpolyglots have distinct differences in their brains' neural activity.
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