The Science of Language

My name is ...,

and I'm not truly tech-savvy, so I'm a wee bit apprehensive about this. I've never written a 'blog', which maybe is strange of our generation. I was not at class for week two. This is because I'm Jewish and that day was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. I was thinking about linguistics however. I don't know much Hebrew, which is the language that all Jews, no matter what other languages they speak or where they live, share somehow. So, I was thinkin'. . . Hebrew was a language created around some pretty major religious principles, and was not used as an every day language in some parts of its history. The result is a language that has the capacity to not communicate a sense of time. One can speak Hebrew to convey very clear messages about time, but in the Torah (the first five books of the Bible and Jew's holy script). God says things like "and it was good" after creating everything, but translated, that could mean "it was good, it is good, it will be good...". This, I think, reflects some way cool ideas in Jewish mysticism about time as being multi-dimensional, everything and nothing, a spectrum... and all that trippy stuff. This is so exciting to me, that language can reflect cultural, even religious concepts. 

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.

My name is Rebekah. I'm down with both Bekah and Rebekah but have never been too fond of Becky. You choose. My interest in linguistics is closely tied to my love for cultural studies. Growing up with my mouth full of spaghetti, I had my heart set on learning Italian. When I got to high school and discovered that Italian wasn't offered, I settled for Spanish not knowing how much I'd come to enjoy it. Eight years later, I'm still getting used to my accent in Spanish and have had the chance to learn Italian while I attended my first two years of college in Italian-speaking, Southern Switzerland.

I am Robert. I am taking this class because I think it will improve my knowledge of psychology and writing.

There was some discussion about Evolutionary Psychology during class the other night. Here's an article that goes into more detail about what nativism means, and how it stacks up against other approaches to psychological explanation.

I've also included this chapter by Pinker called Reverse Engineering the Mind 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:

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.
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.

FUTURESE
The American Language in 3000 AD:

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:

New Scientist Article

Here are the two presentations that I showed this week.

Here's a cool talk that goes into some of the issues around prescriptivism vs descriptivism that we discussed in class on Thursday.

From NPR:

Whether you're a native English speaker or learned the language recently, your accent offers hints about where you're from and when you learned the language. NPR's Lynn Neary speaks to Steven Weinberger about his Speech Accent Archive, a Web site with hundreds of voices and accents from around the world.

Listen to the interview here.

Find the archive here.

I mentioned at the end of class that some of the exercises in phonology were a little more challenging than usual. Here's a tip: think of phonemes as Superman (or most superheros who disguise their identity). You never see Superman and Clark Kent in the same place at the same time. Superman only appears in a specific environment (i.e., when there is danger or a crime is being committed). He is CK the rest of the time. This is the equivalent of being in complementary distribution. Allophones are the same: they never appear in the same environment at the same time, thus we know that they are a single entity (a phoneme). In fact, the analogy carries further: we think of the default value of Superman/CK as CK, right? Because he is CK most of the time, and only becomes Superman in a specific environment. It is exactly the same with allophones of a single phoneme. The default value occurs in the widest variety of environments, and in some specific environments, a change occurs (to the other allophone).

I hope this helps.

From The Language Log

The perils of transcribing spoken language

Heidi Harley's recent analysis of why some listeners heard Jimi Hendrix sing "Scuse me while I kiss this guy" when what he apparently sang was "Scuse me while I kiss the sky" reminded me of the many wrong transcriptions of spoken language that pop up in government transcripts of tape recorded undercover conversations and court hearings. Sometimes a local expression is the problem, as when the government transcribed "it's deeper than a post hole toad" as "is steeper than a postal code" in a Texas sting operation some years ago. No, the bad guys weren't plotting to steal post office files. They were simply using a colorful, but not broadly recognized, Texas expression about a totally benign topic.

This week the legal affairs writer for the Associated Press called me to talk about the problems media and government witnesses were having as they tried to decypher their own notes in the perjury trial of Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Somehow our conversation turned to the problems that court reporters have when they transcribe the proceedings of trials and hearings. The writer then told me about Prosecutor Fitzgerald's statement to the judge when he explained that there would be no deal made in this case. The court reporter's transcript had Fitzgerald saying that he couldn't do this because "it's a thicket of hope." I suppose that if you really worked at it, this version might make some sense but what the prosecutor actually said was "it's a pig in a poke."

Read the whole thing.

Here's the poem:

There is a community of the spirit.

Join it, and feel the delight

of walking in the noisy street

and being the noise.

Language Log: Snow-word progress: glacial at best

Geoff Pullum did his best to sound optimistic a few weeks ago when a reader sent in a reasonably well-informed treatment of the "Eskimo snow words" myth from the Holland Herald, the in-flight magazine of KLM Airlines. This respite from the usual drumbeat of media misinformation was notable enough to catch the attention of Michael Quinion at World Wide Words and Nathan Bierma at the Chicago Tribune, who both shared Geoff's sanguine sentiment that there was "progress at last" on the snow-word front.