Words R Us

wonderful radio interview with the woman who first discovered the songs of whales and is now researching how elephants communicate outside of human auditory range

"A visual dictionary of words with abstract, complex, or underused meanings" - very nice illustrations.

Video of a 19 year old woman in English who suffered a stroke nine months earlier that resulted in Broca's aphasia, from which she's slowly recovering.

"According to Christopher Johnson, a branding expert who runs the Web site the Name Inspector, "there's a land grab going on" in the information economy, as "companies are trying to snatch up pieces of our cultural commons." He lays much of the blame on the increasing scarcity of available names, whether for trademarks, domain names or Twitter handles." See also Language Log discussion: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3055

"Dr. Lera Boroditsky tells us about a language in Australia in which a pigeon-like ability to orient yourself is so crucial...you can't even say hello without knowing exactly which direction you're facing." Part of this podcast: http://www.radiolab.org/2011/jan/25/

Article about debate about Hawaii Creole in Hawaii public schools. Governor Cayetano quoted, "The only time we should be using pidgin English in the public schools is when they're studying pidgin itself, from a historical or cultural point of view."

"Positive evidence presented in a weak way can make listeners suspicious of a predicted outcome, a finding that can have serious implications for professional persuaders like marketers and politicians."

"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."

"Not every language suffers from this deficit of smell adjectives. The Kapsiki of Cameroon, for example, have 14 fundamental smell terms...  awesome words like dzafe and duf'duf are conspicuously absent from European languages."

Good possibilities for field research here.

Pages 7-12 have some fascinating information regarding the brain's usage in multilingual children and adults.