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Ryan Catalani

>Language>Place - blog carnival - 0 views

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    "The idea of "> Language > Place" is to create a collaborate virtual journey through different places, in different formats, and with different languages included - the main language is english, yet the idea is that every post also includes snippets or terms of other languages, and refers to a specific place, country, region or city. "
Lara Cowell

Interactive Hawai`i Place Name Map - 0 views

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    Interested in finding out the meaning of place names in Hawai`i? Check this map out.
shionaou20

One space or two spaces after a full stop? Scientists have finally found the answer - 0 views

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    In the age of founding fathers and type writers, typists used to place two spaces after each full stop in a sentence, because letters of uniform width looked cramped without that extra space. However, with modern word processors and computers, which were designed to have the perfect/variable amount of spacing, the majority of people now only place one space after full stops. This article explains a scientific study run by three psychology researchers from Skidmore college, which shows that placing two spaces after a full stop is better. They found out that the extra space does not necessarily allow people to read faster, but spend fewer milliseconds staring at the full stop and making the reading process smoother.
noah takaesu

The powerful and mysterious brain circuitry that makes us love Google, Twitter, and tex... - 2 views

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    In 1954, psychologist James Olds and his team were working in a laboratory at McGill University, studying how rats learned. They would stick an electrode in a rat's brain and, whenever the rat went to a particular corner of its cage, would give it a small shock and note the reaction. One day they unknowingly inserted the probe in the wrong place, and when Olds tested the rat, it kept returning over and over to the corner where it received the shock. He eventually discovered that if the probe was put in the brain's lateral hypothalamus and the rats were allowed to press a lever and stimulate their own electrodes, they would press until they collapsed.
Kyler Kameoka

The triumph of English as the world's language - 2 views

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    English is a very widespread language and is spoken in various places around the world. Spanish and Chinese are also both very popular languages. But why can't they be as dominant as english? In English a necessity for places around the world?
Lisa Stewart

And Get Off That Lawn I Paid For - It Figures - Figures of Speech - 4 views

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    " They take over a public park they didn't pay for, to go nearby to use bathrooms they didn't pay for, to beg for food from places they they don't want to pay for. Newt Gingrich"
Ryan Catalani

A Walk in the WoRds: Can Randomly Placed Letters Form an Intelligible Word? - 1 views

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    "This past December, a new video debunking this claim made the rounds."
Ryan Catalani

MIT Scientist Captures 90,000 Hours of Video of His Son's First Words, Graphs It | Fast... - 5 views

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    "In one 40-second clip, you can hear how "gaga" turned into "water" over the course of six months. In a video clip, below, you can hear and watch the evolution of "ball." .... Unreal 3-D visualizations allowed his team to zoom through the house like a dollhouse and map the utterance of each word in its context. In a landscape-like image with peaks and valleys, you can see that the word "water" was uttered most often in the kitchen, while "bye" took place at the door."
Lara Cowell

The Mystery of Onomatopoeia Around the World - The Atlantic - 1 views

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    Words formed from a sound and intended to imitate that sound-what linguists refer to as onomatopoeia-fluctuate around the world even when the underlying sound is roughly the same in each place. And the thing about it is, we don't really understand why this fluctuation occurs. It has something to do with the alchemy of humans in different times and places striving to mimic noises in the world around them, and to incorporate this mimicry into distinct linguistic systems and cultural contexts. Some have hypothesized over the years that language originated with the imitation of natural sounds-a notion sometimes referred to as the "bow-wow theory." But whatever the answer to this question, onomatopoeia explains only a sliver of the words we use. The article goes on to share some fun collections of onomatopoeia.
Lara Cowell

In Defence of Creole: Loving our Dialect - 3 views

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    Author Karel McIntosh, a "Trini Creole" (Trinidad Creole English, a.k.a. TCE) and standard English code-switcher, reflects on how TCE is stigmatized in her homeland, arguing that the language has a rightful and valuable place. Readers may find parallels between the linguistic situation in Hawaii and that in Trinidad.
Lara Cowell

Ryukyuan Perspectives for Language Reclamation - 0 views

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    Although a densely academic article, Professor Patrick Heinrich of the University of Venice, discusses the history of colonization in Okinawa and its detrimental effect on the indigenous languages of the region. The Ryūkyūans are a group of indigenous peoples living in the Ryūkyū archipelago, which stretches southwest of the main Japanese island of Kyūshū towards Taiwan. The largest and most populated island of the archipelago, Okinawa Island, is actually closer to Manila, Taipei, Shanghai and Seoul than it is to Tokyo. Though considered by the Japanese as speaking a dialect, the Ryūkyūans speak separate languages such as Okinawan, also known as Uchinaguchi, as well as Amami, Miyako, Yaeyama and Yonaguni. All are part of the Japonic language family, to which the Japanese language also belongs, and all are recognized as endangered languages by UNESCO. Language reclamation in the contemporary Ryukyus departs from a keen awareness that language loss is bigger than language itself. Activists know that losing a language entails the loss of an entire world of symbolic representations, and therefore, of how to place oneself in the world. Concepts of self, society, and place change when one language is replaced by another (Guay 2023). Language loss is no trivial loss. Language loss and the sociocultural displacement accompanying it are responsible for many problems in endangered speech communities worldwide, including those in Japan. Endangered language communities like the Ryukyuans and the Ainu are more likely than the majority Japanese to suffer from prejudice, poverty, spiritual disconnectedness from their heritage culture, family instability, or difficulties to climb the social ladder (see Onai 2011). Language loss also causes a weakening of cultural autonomy. It becomes more difficult to support the community's self-image if majority languages are adopted (Heinrich and Ishihara 2018). Language reclamation addresses these problems and in so doing contribut
Lara Cowell

There's a science behind baby talk - and why everyone does it : NPR - 0 views

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    This article talked about how adults talk to babies and why we do it. When we talk to babies, we tend to raise our pitch a little and supposedly, it calms the baby down. They also talked about a research project where they recorded adults from different parts of the world, and noticed that those who come from western places raised their pitch the most, and in remote places didn't raise their pitch that much but everyone raised their pitch at least a little. The way we talk to babies is universal and we've evolved as humans to be able to communicate with infants.
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    The features of baby talk - softer tone, higher pitch, almost unintelligible vocabulary - are global. Researchers at Harvard's Music Lab documented over 1,500 recordings in 21 urban, rural and Indigenous communities - making their work possibly a first of its kind experiment. The article includes samples from different languages around the world. There are many reasons why baby talk might have evolved in humans and why it might serve beneficial purposes. Some theories suggest that the way we speak accentuates the vowels of the speech and helps babies learn speech. Other theories suggest that this kind of baby talk helps regulate the baby's emotions and helps structure the social interactions we have with babies, so it helps socialize them and control their behavior and mood. In prehistoric times, having ways to interact with babies and to care for them while still being able to keep your eyes up to look out for predators and use your voice to interact with babies, might have been an important reason why we may have evolved these kinds of behaviors.
Darien Lau

Japanese Onomatopeia - 3 views

Onomatopoeia

started by Darien Lau on 04 Apr 13 no follow-up yet
Lara Cowell liked it
ebullard16

Vanishing Languages, Reincarnated as Music - 2 views

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    Australian composer Liza Lim unveils her opera "Tree of Codes," which includes snippets of a Turkish whistling language from a small mountain village. This article explains that numerous people believe that if tradition is dying, something new should take it's place; there must be a way to incarnate the dying into something new.
Lara Cowell

Attention, Students: Put Your Laptops Away - 1 views

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    There are two hypotheses to why note-taking is beneficial in the first place. The first idea is called the encoding hypothesis, which says that when a person is taking notes, "the processing that occurs" will improve "learning and retention." The second, called the external-storage hypothesis, is that you learn by being able to look back at your notes, or even the notes of other people. A 2014 study published in _Psychological Science_, co-written by Pam A. Mueller of Princeton University and Daniel M. Oppenheimer of the University of California, Los Angeles, suggests that taking longhand notes may have superior external storage as well as superior encoding functions, in comparison to taking notes via laptop.
Kayla Lar Rieu

Californians, Having Curbed Bilingual Education, May Now Expand It - 0 views

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    This article is about how California is changing its view on their law that is currently in place which restricts public schools from having a bilingual education curriculum.
matthewmettias18

The Linguistic Evolution of 'Like' - 0 views

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    In our mouths or in print, in villages or in cities, in buildings or in caves, a language doesn't sit still. It can't. Language change has preceded apace even in places known for preserving a language in amber. You may have heard that Icelanders can still read the ancient sagas written almost a thousand years ago in Old Norse.
karatsuruda17

Almost Before We Spoke, We Swore - 0 views

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    This article talks about the evolution of profanity and how certain words came to be classified as taboo. Researchers have found that cursing, is a human universal. Every language studied, living or dead, have all left traces of forbidden speech. They have also discovered that cursing is often a mixture of raw, spontaneous feelings, as they are oftentimes used to place emphasis on a specific word or sentence.
Lara Cowell

The Glossary of Happiness - The New Yorker - 0 views

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    Could understanding other cultures' concepts of joy and well-being help us reshape our own? The Positive Lexicography Project aims to catalogue foreign terms for happiness that have no direct English translation. The brainchild of Tim Lomas, a lecturer in applied positive psychology at the University of East London, the first edition included two hundred and sixteen expressions from forty-nine languages, published in January. Lomas used online dictionaries and academic papers to define each word and place it into one of three overarching categories, doing his best to capture its cultural nuances. The glossary can be found here: http://www.drtimlomas.com/#!alphabetical-lexicography/b5ojm
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