Words R Us

a clearly written online textbook

"Might people who write only by printing - in block letters, or perhaps with a sloppy, squiggly signature - be more at risk for forgery? Is the development of a fine motor skill thwarted by an aversion to cursive handwriting? And what happens when young people who are not familiar with cursive have to read historical documents like the Constitution?"

has specific examples of figures in sound and movie files--American examples from speeches, radio, ads, etc.

As a speaker myself of a conlang, I am always impressed when other humans willfully become weirder than we already are -- even to learning a "non-Terran" (sort of) language. And its syntax is OVS, rare here on earth, but it does exist. As Hamlet said, "taH pagh, taHbe".

"Now, after a computer analysis of three decades of hit songs, Dr. DeWall and other psychologists report finding what they were looking for: a statistically significant trend toward narcissism and hostility in popular music. As they hypothesized, the words "I" and "me" appear more frequently along with anger-related words, while there's been a corresponding decline in "we" and "us" and the expression of positive emotions."

The New England Journal of Medicine has a first-person article about the consequences of the language of economics in the doctoring biz . From the article, "A decent medical-care system that helps all the people cannot be built without the language of equity and care. If this language is permitted to die and is completely replaced by the language of efficiency and cost control, all of us - including physicians - will lose something precious."

A U of M professor is trying to beat the clock to finish his masterwork: A dictionary of the origins of some of the most misunderstood words in English.... Liberman discovered that about 1,000 common English words -- mooch, nudge, man, girl, boy, frog, oat, witch and skedaddle among them -- seemed to be highly confused or all but untraceable, as if they magically appeared in English, pouf!

If you've got a bit of phlegm in the throat, the Klingon alphabet is just the thing for clearing that out.

"In recent decades, the study of language acquisition and instruction has increasingly focused on "chunking": how children learn language not so much on a word-by-word basis but in larger "lexical chunks" or meaningful strings of words that are committed to memory ... A native speaker picks up thousands of chunks like "heavy rain" or "make yourself at home" in childhood, and psycholinguistic research suggests that these phrases are stored and processed in the brain as individual units."

Good find, Ryan! I also took the video link and embedded it into our moodle page.

Semantic Sustainability

Here's a followup on the Economist's language blog: http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/04/change . The comments are pretty interesting, too.

"The results are bad news for universalists: "most observed functional dependencies between traits are lineage-specific rather than universal tendencies," according to the authors. [...] If universal features can't account for what we observe, what can? Common descent. "Cultural evolution is the primary factor that determines linguistic structure, with the current state of a linguistic system shaping and constraining future states." It's important to emphasize that this study looked at a specific language feature (word order)."

In the 1960s, Michael Gazzaniga with Roger Sperry & Joseph Bogen pioneered split brain research. This video shows how one patient's language centers for comprehension and speech are now distinct due to the cutting of his corpus callosum.

Wow! I think the students will find this fascinating.

I saw this topic at one of ms. stewarts posts and the topic really interests me as someone that is really interested in biology and believes in the science of medicine. possible research topic.