ARCHIVE - Rick's blog http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage/blog/8 en ARCHIVE - The Linguists http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage/the-linguists <p><object width="600" height="450"><br /> <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/gxI1MP3H92M&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1" /> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /> <param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/gxI1MP3H92M&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="600" height="450"></embed></object></p> http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage/the-linguists#comment Fri, 05 Dec 2008 08:58:14 -0800 Rick 167 at http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage ARCHIVE - CPML: Week 8 http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage/cpml-week-8 <h2>Readings:</h2> <ul> <li>Bickerton, chapt. 12, 13</li> </ul> <h2>Linguistic Concepts:</h2> <p><a href="http://www.askoxford.com/globalenglish/borrowings/?view=uk">Borrowings into English</a></p> <p>Africa</p> <blockquote><p>(1) Afrikaans: aardvark, aardwolf, apartheid, Boer, commandeer, commando, dorp, kop, kopje/koppie, laager, outspan, puff-adder, spoor, springbok, trek, wildebeest.<br /><br /> (2) Bantu languages, including Kongo, Swahili, Tswana, Xhosa, Zulu: boma, bwana, chimpanzee, impala, impi, indaba, mamba, marimba, tsetse, uhuru, zombie.<br /><br /> (3) West African languages, including Ewe, Fanti, Hausa, Mandingo, mainly through the Atlantic creoles: anansi, gumbo, harmattan, juju, juke(box), mumbo-jumbo, okra, voodoo, yam; perhaps banjo, jazz.<br /><br /> (4) Malagasy: raffia.<br /><br /> (5) Khoisan languages: gnu, karoo, quagga.<br /> </p></blockquote> <p><hr /></p> <p>Check out the <a href="http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/JWCrawford/">Language Policy</a> website.</p> <p><a href="http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage/cpml-week-8">read more</a></p> http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage/cpml-week-8#comment Wed, 19 Nov 2008 21:16:56 -0800 Rick 164 at http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage ARCHIVE - Week 7: Discussion thread http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage/week-6-discussion-thread <p>Here's a thread to collect your thoughts, questions, and ideas about the reading for this week.</p> http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage/week-6-discussion-thread#comment Sun, 02 Nov 2008 12:35:25 -0800 Rick 162 at http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage ARCHIVE - Discussion Thread: Week 4 http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage/discussion-thread-week-3 <p>Use this thread to collect thoughts about the readings for this week. Post questions for seminar, or things that you'd like to follow up on.</p> http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage/discussion-thread-week-3#comment Sat, 18 Oct 2008 08:40:53 -0700 Rick 158 at http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage ARCHIVE - Discussion Thread: Week 2 http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage/discussion-thread-week-2 <p>Use this thread to collect thoughts and questions about the readings for week 2. Feel free to think out loud, and get a jump on some good seminar topics for us to discuss when we meet next week.</p> http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage/discussion-thread-week-2#comment Fri, 10 Oct 2008 08:26:48 -0700 Rick 149 at http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage ARCHIVE - Nativism and Evolutionary Psychology http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage/nativism <p>There was some discussion about Evolutionary Psychology during class the other night. Here's <a href="http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage//files/scienceoflanguage/Nativism_in_Cognitive_Science.pdf">an article</a> that goes into more detail about what nativism means, and how it stacks up against other approaches to psychological explanation.</p> <p>I've also included this chapter by Pinker called <a href="http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage//files/scienceoflanguage/Pinker-ReverseEngineeringTheMind.doc">Reverse Engineering the Mind</a> in order to give you a general picture of where linguistics fits in the larger picture of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. Here's a snip from the Pinker chapter:</p> <blockquote><p> The human mind poses a paradox: on one hand it is an engineering masterpiece — witness the slow progress in building robots to do every day tasks that we take for granted (see Dennett, this volume). On the other hand, the mind displays many apparent quirks and maladaptive features: disgust, superstitions and romantic love to name a few. To solve this puzzle, I suggest that the principles of reverse engineering, i.e., the attempt to understand how a structure works by asking what it is designed to do, should be applied to the mind. Much of research in anatomy and physiology has been the reverse engineering of the complex structures of the body, invoking the idea that each part was in some sense ‘designed’ for a particular function, e.g., the eye as an image-forming device. Biological design, as we currently understand it, arises as a result of evolution through natural selection. Applying this to the mind means studying its functions in terms of the evolutionary processes that created it. To do this we need to examine the selective pressures that were operating in the hunter–gatherer societies in which humans evolved.<br /> Evolution is one of the three key ideas that I consider are needed to understand how the mind works. The second is that the function of the brain is the processing of information or computation, and the third that the mind is not a single organ but a system of organs of computation, each specialized for a particular perceptual, cognitive, emotional or motor function. Thus the mind is a system of organs of computation that allowed our ancestors to understand and get the better of objects, plants, animals and each other (Pinker, 1997). These ideas are not new and have been successfully applied in perception research but they have had little impact on large areas of psychology, such as the emotions, sexuality and humour. I elaborate this view by discussing examples from cognition, language and emotions about objects and people. </p></blockquote> <p><a href="http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage/nativism">read more</a></p> http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage/nativism#comment Sun, 05 Oct 2008 11:37:25 -0700 Rick 48 at http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage ARCHIVE - Future English http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage/future-english <p><a href="http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/futurese.html">FUTURESE<br /> The American Language in 3000 AD</a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>Predicting the future of the English language is rather easy, in the short term. The odds are, over the next few decades its New World dialects are going to gain increasing global dominance, accelerating the demise of thousands of less fortunate languages but at long last allowing a single advertisement to reach everybody in the world. Then after a century or two of US dominance some other geopolitical grouping will gain the ascendancy, everyone will learn Chechen or Patagonian or whatever it is, and history will continue as usual. Ho hum. But apart from that... what might the language actually look like in a thousand years time? For comparison, the English spoken at the turn of the last millennium looked like this:</p> </blockquote><p><a href="http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage/future-english">read more</a></p> http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage/future-english#comment Thu, 28 Aug 2008 21:47:43 -0700 Rick 139 at http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage ARCHIVE - Charades and Sentence Structure http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage/charades-and-sentence-structure <p><object width="425" height="344"><br /> <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/FXkcoav48nk&amp;hl=en" /> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/FXkcoav48nk&amp;hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object></p> <p><a href="http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/dn14228-charades-reveals-a-universal-sentence-structure.html">New Scientist Article</a></p> http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage/charades-and-sentence-structure#comment Tue, 01 Jul 2008 09:16:20 -0700 Rick 138 at http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage ARCHIVE - Writing systems http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage/writing-systems <p>Here are the two presentations that I showed this week.</p> http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage/writing-systems#comment Thu, 21 Feb 2008 20:54:23 -0800 Rick 129 at http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage ARCHIVE - Erin McKean, lexicographer http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage/erin-mckean-lexicographer <p><a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/161">Here's a cool talk</a> that goes into some of the issues around prescriptivism vs descriptivism that we discussed in class on Thursday.</p> <p><object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=8,0,0,0" width="432" height="285" id="VE_Player" align="middle"><br /> <param name="movie" value="http://static.videoegg.com/ted/flash/loader.swf" /><PARAM NAME="FlashVars" VALUE="bgColor=FFFFFF&amp;file=http://static.videoegg.com/ted/movies/ERINMCKEAN-2007_high.flv&amp;autoPlay=false&amp;fullscreenURL=http://static.videoegg.com/ted/flash/fullscreen.html&amp;forcePlay=false&amp;logo=&amp;allowFullscreen=true" /><br /> <param name="quality" value="high" /> <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /> <param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF" /> <param name="scale" value="noscale" /> <param name="wmode" value="window" /><embed src="http://static.videoegg.com/ted/flash/loader.swf" FlashVars="bgColor=FFFFFF&amp;file=http://static.videoegg.com/ted/movies/ERINMCKEAN-2007_high.flv&amp;autoPlay=false&amp;fullscreenURL=http://static.videoegg.com/ted/flash/fullscreen.html&amp;forcePlay=false&amp;logo=&amp;allowFullscreen=true" quality="high" allowScriptAccess="always" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" scale="noscale" wmode="window" width="432" height="285" name="VE_Player" align="middle" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"></embed></object></p> <p><a href="http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage/erin-mckean-lexicographer">read more</a></p> http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage/erin-mckean-lexicographer#comment Sat, 12 Jan 2008 18:47:36 -0800 Rick 102 at http://www2.evergreen.edu/scienceoflanguage