Language
kbonham | November 22, 2010Most of my favorite long-standing discussions with friends and family tend to resolve around definitions. My good friend Paul and I have had hours upon hours of discussion about the nature of the universe - he calls his perception of the order of the universe "god," and I call myself an atheist (interestingly, that picture was taken by Paul), though in practical terms I don't think our beliefs are really that far apart. He says his definition allows him to engage with religious people, I say it just causes confusion.
In my first year of graduate school, I used to argue endlessly with my class…
gregladen | October 22, 2010Human infants require more care than they should, if we form our expectations based on closely related species (apes, and more generally, Old World simian primates). It has been said that humans are born three months early. This is not accurate. It was thought that our body size predicted a 12 month gestation, and some suggested that Neanderthals would have had such, but this research conclusion has been set aside based on new analysis. But it is still true that developmentally, human children do not reach a stage of development that allows some degree of self care for a very long time…
cevans | October 8, 2010
In case you didn't know, reality is science fiction.
If you doubt me, read the news. Read, for example, this recent article in the New York Times about Carnegie Mellon's "Read the Web" program, in which a computer system called NELL (Never Ending Language Learner) is systematically reading the internet and analyzing sentences for semantic categories and facts, essentially teaching itself idiomatic English as well as educating itself in human affairs. Paging Vernor Vinge, right?
NELL reads the Web 24 hours a day, seven days a week, learning language like a human would -- cumulatively, over…
gregladen | October 7, 2010... of English:
The nomenclature for the US accents is wildly incorrect, but these are good renditions of something.
cevans | August 6, 2010
Let's talk about the God Particle.
It strikes me that people refer to the Higgs boson as the "God particle" in the same way some call the iPhone the "Jesus phone": with an almost pointed disregard for what such a prefix actually means. Considering the intensity of the culture wars, the popularity of the moniker is baffling. Is this about contextualizing the abstraction (and grandeur) of particle physics in a way "regular" people can understand? Does this represent a humanist concession to the religious? If so, can religious culture really be swayed by such a transparent ploy -- y'know, it…
grrlscientist | July 9, 2010
Railroad Sunset (1929, oil on canvas).
Edward Hopper.
I've noticed that I've recently started to dream in German. Well, the people who pop up in my dreams are speaking German, and I seem to understand them and act accordingly, but I never speak in German in my dreams. Actually, I rarely say anything aloud in my dreams anymore; probably a reflection of real life.
The interesting thing about this is that I don't speak German. Well, I can utter a few words or phrases here and there, and my comprehension of spoken German is growing, but I don't speak it myself.
Oddly, even though I still have…
gregladen | June 21, 2010So, a while ago, Ben Zvanwas talking about doing something with the Bible, which would involve processing the text through some filters and recompiling it. This sort of thing has always interested me: Not recompiling the bible, but rather, textual analysis in general using the basic material stripped of intended meaning by classifying and ordering arbitrarily. What, for example, is the vocabulary of the Rosetta stone, or the Kensington Rune Stone (a probable fake Viking misssive on display in west-central Minnesota). Does the rune stone sample the lexicon of a particular time period or…
gregladen | June 10, 2010The Queen's got a point: (Hat tip, Jennifer Ouellette)
I think this guy needs to notch it down a ways.
gregladen | June 9, 2010Or ... What I had for breakfast.
I just got the Caribou Coffee trivia question wrong. I got it so wrong that the Barista stared at me in disbelief for a moment, then blurted out the correct answer with audible snark and disappointment. If I told you what the question was (and that is not going to happen) you would be embarrassed for me as well. This was especially bad because I usually answer the question by adding some additional fact, or spice things up by answering the question in Classical Greek or Latin, or at least provide one or two scholarly references. But this time it was a dumb…
gregladen | June 1, 2010I'm very please that my discussion of the "we can't ever know what a word is" Internet meme has elicited a response from Mark Liberman at Language Log. (here) Mark was very systematic in his comments, so I will be very systematic in my responses.
1. Without a careful definition of what you mean by "word" and by "language X", questions like "how many words are there in language X" are pretty much meaningless, because different definitions will yield very different numbers.
This is very much off the mark. I can measure the distance from the earth to the moon using a variety of techniques,…
gregladen | May 31, 2010I am looking at the question: How many words are there in a language? I'd like to know for languages in general, comparatively, and for pedagogical reasons, in some well known western language which may as well be English.
What I found quite incidentally is a hornets nest of curmudgeonistic pedanticmaniacal jibberishosity. (There. Whatever the count was, it is now N+3)
(For more Falsehoods, click here. Also, listen to "Everything You Know is Sort of Wrong," on Skeptically Speaking Talk Radio. )
First I want to explain why I was interested in this at all. There has for some years been…
jgoldman | May 10, 2010...and what can word-learning in dogs teach us about the evolution of language in humans?
What is involved in the learning of a single new word? Consider the word "tiger", being learned by a child with already a modest vocabulary, at least for animal words. First the child must make a new entry in the mental lexicon - that "tiger" is a word in the first place. He has to categorize it as a noun. It has to be categorized under "animal" (a supernym) and related to its hyponyms, like "Sumatran tiger." Then, of course, the child has to learn what actual *thing* the word "tiger" refers to. Now,…
edyong | March 19, 2010
We like to be in control of our own lives, and some of us have an automatic rebellious streak when we're told what to do. We're less likely to do a task if we're ordered to do it than if we make the choice of our own volition. It seems that this effect is so strong that it even happens when the people giving the orders are... us.
In a set of three experiments, Ibrahim Senay from the University of Illinois has shown that people do better at a simple task if ask themselves whether they'll do it than if they simply tell themselves to do so. Even a simple reversal of words - "Will I" compared…
razib | March 17, 2010The Evolution Of Symbolic Language by Terrence Deacon and Ursula Goodenough. Deacon's The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain is a book I liked a great deal, though in hindsight I don't think I had the background to appreciate it in any depth (nor do I now).
bioephemera | March 13, 2010For the annals of humorous translation mistakes, this package from a digital antenna we bought last fall promises to . . . do something. I'm not sure what.
For John O, who enjoys terrible advertising.
razib | February 21, 2010Lost of discussion about Basques below. Some interesting examples which are less speculative.
Hungary = Language changes, genes do not
The intrusion of ethnic Magyars, and later the settlement of Kipchak Turks fleeing the Mongols, within Hungary is historically attested. Additionally, down to the Reformation there were isolated settlements of Turks among the Magyars which maintained their own linguistic tradition. But digging through the literature it is very difficult to find much genetic impact. Anatolian Turks are a milder case; eastern genetic contributions can be found, but it is the…
sb admin | January 7, 2010It's football season in America: The NFL playoffs are about to start, and tonight, the elected / computer-ranked top college team will be determined. What better time than now to think about ... baseball! Baseball players, unlike most football players, must solve one of the most complicated perceptual puzzles in sports: how to predict the path of a moving target obeying the laws of physics, and move to intercept it.
The question of how a baseball player knows where to run in order to catch a fly ball has baffled psychologists for decades. (You might argue that a football receiver faces a…
sb admin | January 6, 2010Here's this week's list of notable posts from Psychology and Neuroscience at ResearchBlogging.org.
Is autism really surging? Michelle Dawson wonders whether the recent rise in autism rates can be traced to methodological differences in studies tracking autism rates.
We know many men are attracted to younger women, but what does it mean to look younger? Wayne Hooke looks at a recent study and concludes that looking younger may be a matter of looking less masculine.
Ever had a song that you just can't get out of your head -- an "earworm"? You'd think that psychologists would be all over…
sb admin | December 24, 2009Television can have a huge influence on our lives. But the most important influences may be the ones we don't even notice. I discuss several fascinating studies about television in my latest column on Seedmagazine.com. Here's a snippet:
Travis Saunders, a PhD student at the University of Ottawa who studies the impact of sedentary lifestyles, questions whether a little exercise can make up for hours of inactivity. He refers to a study led by G.F. Dunton of the University of Southern California and published in October in the International Journal of Obesity. The researchers conducted a phone…
edyong | December 7, 2009Many human languages achieve great diversity by combining basic words into compound ones - German is a classic example of this. We're not the only species that does this. Campbell's monkeys have just six basic types of calls but they have combined them into one of the richest and most sophisticated of animal vocabularies.
By chaining calls together in ways that drastically alter their meaning, they can communicate to each other about other falling trees, rival groups, harmless animals and potential threats. They can signal the presence of an unspecified threat, a leopard or an eagle, and…