language
edyong | October 19, 2009
From a young age, children learn about the sounds that animals make. But even without teaching aides like Old Macdonald's farm, it turns out that very young babies have an intuitive understanding of the noises that humans, and even monkeys, ought to make. Athena Vouloumanos from New York University found that at just five months of age, infants match human speech to human faces and monkey calls to monkey faces. Amazingly, this wasn't a question of experience - the same infants failed to match quacks to duck faces, even though they had more experience with ducks than monkeys.
Voloumanos…
neurophilosophy | October 16, 2009THINKING of and saying a word is something that most of us do effortlessly many times a day. This involves a number of steps - we must select the appropriate word, decide on the proper tense, and also pronounce it correctly. The neural computations underlying these tasks are highly complex, and whether the brain performs them all at the same time, or one after the other, has been a subject of debate.
This debate has now apparently been settled, by a team of American researchers who had the rare opportunity to investigate language processing in conscious epileptic patients undergoing surgery…
edyong | October 14, 2009In the 1990s, Colombia reintegrated five left-wing guerrilla groups back into mainstream society after decades of conflict. Education was a big priority - many of the guerrillas had spent their entire lives fighting and were more familiar with the grasp of a gun than a pencil. Reintegration offered them the chance to learn to read and write for the first time in their lives, but it also offered Manuel Carreiras a chance to study what happens in the human brain as we become literate.
Of course, millions of people - children - learn to read every year but this new skill arrives in the context…
dmunger | October 8, 2009Classical Indian dancing is a tradition that extends back 2,000 years. Unlike much Western dance, it is intended to express specific emotions and tell detailed stories. The Natyasastra, a text from the first or second century A.D., offers instructions for how to depict nine primary emotions, and these rules continue to be followed in Indian Classical dance today. This movie demonstrates one form of Indian Classical dance:
As you can see, each gesture has a highly-specific meaning, which, to my eyes, at least, isn't obvious. Yet much research has shown that many emotions share "universal"…
aardvarchaeology | October 7, 2009
Most rune stones are written with the late 16-character futhark and date from the 11th century when the Scandies had largely been Christianised. Their inscriptions tend to be formulaic: "Joe erected the stone after Jim his father who was a very good man". But by that time, runic writing was already 900 years old. It's just that inscriptions in the early 24-character futhark are much less common. And when you find them, their messages are usually far less straight-forward.
My buddy Frans Arne Stylegar reports in a series of blog entries [1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5] on the discovery, less than two…
edyong | September 29, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. The blog is on holiday until the start of October, when I'll return with fresh material.
For decades, scientists have realised that languages evolve in strikingly similar ways to genes and living things. Their words and grammars change and mutate over time, and new versions slowly rise to dominance while other face extinction.
In this evolutionary analogy, old texts like the Canterbury Tales are the English language's version of the fossil record. They preserve the existence of words that used to…
aardvarchaeology | September 18, 2009Musical styles can have really weird names. There's sauce music (salsa), meringue music (merengue), juvenile delinquent music (punk), record collection music (disco), LSD warehouse music (acid house), popular music (pop), you name it. But some of the most intensely loved musical styles have names that mean "copulation music".
"Jazz" was once a verb meaning "to fuck". Jazz music was originally played in the better class of New Orleans brothel, where men would listen to music before, well, getting down to some actual jazzing and jizzing.
Likewise with "swing". A verb meaning "to fuck". (Here…
aardvarchaeology | September 4, 2009Visa större karta
Here are two pieces of convoluted Scandy and English etymology that converge in my head.
"Marshmallow" was originally the common name of a plant, Althaea officinalis (Sw. läkemalva), from which a thickening agent was made. This agent was added to meringue foam to produce the toastable sweet pillows we all know and love. And so the sweet took over the name of the marsh-dwelling mallow plant.
On GÃ¥lö, the peninsula where I helped with excavations yesterday, is a place called Kärrmaräng. This means "Marsh Lagoon Meadow", but the Swedish word for meringue is maräng, so "…
dmunger | August 27, 2009One of the most exciting moments of my junior-high-school career was stepping into my first-ever foreign-language classroom. While foreign language studies had a reputation for being tedious, I was nonetheless thrilled at the idea of being able to communicate with people from a different, seemingly more exotic part of the world. We were allowed to choose between French and Spanish, and I picked French because it seemed more "glamorous."
Excited as I was to learn a new language, I was still shocked to find out that every word was either "masculine" or "feminine." Livre, "book," was masculine…
edyong | July 11, 2009
As Eddie Izzard notes in the video above, the English, within our cosy, post-imperialist, monolingual culture, often have trouble coping with the idea of two languages or more jostling about for space in the same head. "No one can live at that speed!" he suggests. And yet, bilingual children seem to cope just fine. In fact, they pick up their dual tongues at the same pace as monolingual children attain theirs, despite having to cope with two sets of grammar and vocabulary. At around 12 months, both groups produce their first words and after another six months, they…
aardvarchaeology | June 29, 2009Current Archaeology's July issue offers a lot of good reading, of which I particularly like the stories on human origins (see below) and garden archaeology at Kenilworth Castle. But I have two complaints.
First point of criticism. The editors of CA have this weird habit of doing "media tie-ins" without any clear indication of authorship. In the past three issues were excerpts from a forthcoming book by Barry Cunliffe. They weren't billed as written by Cunliffe. Instead you got the impression that a nameless writer had read his book manuscript and paraphrased it for the magazine. "Cunliffe…
dmunger | June 23, 2009I've always been amazed by people who are truly bilingual. While I've studied languages in school, I've never been able to seamlessly switch between languages, and even my best non-English language, French, is choppy at best. Compare this to the people I see in restaurants or on the subway, who can have conversations in two languages at once, speaking each language with equal fluency. They might tell a story in English, but save the punch line for Spanish. If a monolingual person talks to them, they instantly respond in the proper language, with hardly a second thought.
There are enough…
edyong | June 19, 2009Talking with someone comes so naturally that we forget sometimes how skilful it is. Rhythms of conversation and cues of grammar need to be judged so that people can take their turns at talking without cutting off their partner or without leaving pregnant pauses. The former is rude, the latter awkward.
That's certainly how things are usually conducted in English, but a new study suggests that this pattern of turn-taking applies across human cultures. By studying 10 languages from all over the world, Tanya Stivers from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics discovered a universally…
edyong | June 14, 2009
Discriminating against people who do not speak your language is a big problem. A new study suggests that the preferences that lead to these problems are hard-wired at a very young age. Even five-month-old infants, who can't speak themselves, have preferences for native speakers and native accents.
The human talent for language is one of our crowning evolutionary achievements, allowing us to easily and accurately communicate with our fellows. But as the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel relates, linguistic differences can serve to drive us apart and act as massive barriers between…
edyong | May 29, 2009When Walt Disney created Mickey Mouse in 1928, he understood the draw that anthropomorphic mice would have. But even Walt's imagination might have struggled to foresee the events that have just taken place in a German genetics laboratory. There, a group of scientists led by Wolfgang Enard have "humanising" a gene in mice to study its potential relevance for human evolution.
The gene in question is the fascinating FOXP2, which I have written extensively about before, particularly in a feature for New Scientist. FOXP2 was initially identified as the gene behind an inherited disorder that…
dmunger | May 28, 2009Take a look at this video. Your job: decide which person speaks first:
Click to view Video 1 (QuickTime required)
Let's make this a poll:
Which person in Video 1 speaks first?(web poll)
Now, try another one. Once again, decide which person speaks first:
Click to view Video 2 (QuickTime required)
Make your response here:
Which person in Video 2 speaks first?(opinion polls)
David Rose and Tanya Clark showed videos like this to 17 student volunteers, and asked the same question: who spoke first in each video? The videos are point-light displays, which show movements of particular points on…
aardvarchaeology | May 21, 2009
A lesson in Swedish from the mall at Sickla.
Last = noun from the verb lasta, "to load".
In = in
Fart = noun from the verb fara, "to travel", cf. "wayfarer" and "fare thee well".
Load-in-travel. Delivery entrance.
dmunger | May 18, 2009If, like me, you grew up in the U.S. in the 1970s and 80s, you probably remember the game show Name That Tune, where contestants heard brief snippets from popular songs and had to name them as quickly as possible. Even though I didn't know most of the music, which was primarily American Standards from the 30s, 40s, and 50s, I still found the show fascinating. My favorite part of the game was when the two contestants engaged in a bidding war, where a clue was given and the contestants bet on how few notes it would take them to recall the title of the song. Sometimes a contestant could actually…
aardvarchaeology | May 8, 2009Anglophones find it really funny that one of Sweden's oldest towns is named Sick Tuna -- spelled Sigtuna. However, -tuna has nothing to do with fish, being instead a cognate of Eng. town and Ge. Zaun. It has something to do with enclosed areas. As a reply to a question from my friend Per Vikstrand, here's a snippet about these place names from the Migration Period chapter of my book manuscript about political geography in 1st Millennium Ãstergötland.
Of the place-name categories in Ãstergötland suggested as indicating a status above the ordinary, only one is likely to have been productive…
dmunger | May 4, 2009The SNARC effect is a fascinating phenomenon (and no, it has nothing to do with cheeky one-off blog posts). When asked to recognize numbers, people react faster with their left hand for low numbers, and faster with their right hand for high numbers. Take a look at this graph:
This shows the results of an experiment led by Samuel Shaki: Twelve Canadian university students were shown a series of single-digit numbers. Their task was simple: as quickly as possible, press one button if the number is odd, and another button if the number is even. This graph charts reaction time of the right hand…