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pinker September 11, 2007

Posted by ocmpoma in : language , add a comment

TedTalks has a couple new videos up featuring Steven Pinker. Now, I know that there are some folks out there who don’t think Dr Pinker is all that, but hey — he’s talking about language, after all; I can’t resist.

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evangelical August 30, 2007

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New to my blogroll, thanks to this TED Talk and my tangential, ongoing interest in language…
…for example, Language Log is also on the blogroll — oh, and this book I can’t recommend enough…
…is the Dictionary Evangelist. Worth a look if you like words.

???? of mein favorite English words? Macaronic.

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evo-lingo June 4, 2007

Posted by ocmpoma in : language, supernaturalism , add a comment

Last week I finished reading John McWhorter’s The Power of Babel, which is subtitled as “A Natural History of Language” — and it’s a great read for anyone interested in languages, especially in how they change and evolve over time, including interesting tidbits on all sorts of nuances and intricacies and damnits.

More importantly, however, the book discusses the changable nature of language, and the at best fuzzy barriers between languages and dialects and pidgins — and does so with a rough comparison to biological evolution. Now, McWhorter in no way says that the way languages evolve and the way living things evolve are the same. Instead, he uses biological evolution to help move the discussion of linguistic evolution along.

For me, that was the part of the book that got me thinking, but in reverse, you might say. I filed away the information gleaned to be able to present linguistic change as something that could help when one is discussing biological evolution. The parallels are useful:

‘language’ as dialects : species (especially ‘ring species‘)
unintended changes and complexity : unguided evolutionary processes
(no one ‘intelligently designed’ a language)
the rise of new languages : speciation events
language families : the creationist canard of ‘kinds’
reconstructing older languages and language groups : biological ancestry

As I said, the parrellels are many, and the similarities very interesting. Next time you find yourself discussing evolution with someone who doesn’t understand a central concept, try throwing some evo-lingo at ‘em.

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the run down language and thought blues May 8, 2007

Posted by ocmpoma in : language , 1 comment so far

Mixing Memory over at ScienceBlogs has a great summary post up about a paper which describes how language seems to most certainly effect how we think. The kicker? The languages involved are English (yawn…) and Russian.

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A Coupe By Any Other Name… April 23, 2007

Posted by ocmpoma in : language , add a comment

Arnold Zwicky has a post over at Language Log about product names that affect sales in certain regions. The lead example of this provided is that of Mitsubishi’s coupe, the Lancer.

Or, more specifically, the Lancer Evolution. Guess where it doesn’t seem to sell all that well?

(note — The LL post mentions, and I agree, that more investigation is needed to determine how much correlation might be causation in this case; I still find the relationship interesting.)

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Rosé February 13, 2007

Posted by ocmpoma in : food & drink, language , add a comment

Over at Knowledge Problem, Lynne Kiesling has a great post up about language, metaphor, Steven Pinker, and wine flavor.

As she sums up, she writes, “it is in the nature of human language to use metaphor as hooks into our shared knowledge when we are describing a personal, potentially unknown experience to someone else.”

Which is the essence of what, to me, is the gulf between objective (quantitative) language and subjective (qualitative) language. We can’t describe, really, what wine tastes like — we can only attempt to convey our subjective reaction to the flavor via abstract, qualitative language.

The map, especially the map of subjective experience, is not the territory.

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Inarticulacy December 21, 2006

Posted by ocmpoma in : language , 2comments

A certain poster in the forums who was the first to be awarded a certain prize has left a long series of one-off posts about the importance of abiding by certain norms whilst attempting to communicate. This is something of a long-term trend, it seems, in the forums: theists will, from time to time, mention the… shall we say, flavoring of many posts. The resident atheists will often respond with more… flavoring.

So, then, what’s going on? Is it really important to use or avoid using profanity? Is it possible that inserting certain ‘colorful metaphors’ into one’s speech can damage one’s ability to achieve the goals of that speech?

(more…)

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