CapitalistImperialistPig

Some languages have only black (or dark) and light (white) as color words. Those languages that add a third color word always seem to add red. Additional words are added in an almost perfectly regular order. The maximum, as in English, seems to be eleven, and they are almost exactly the same eleven. Of course this doesn't mean speakers of those languages with fewer color words see fewer colors or are impoverished in their ability to describe colors. Instead, they probably resort to devices familiar to artists and whoever names the contents of the giant-sized Crayola boxes - compare the color to something in our experience, like the color of the leaves of the dgoberry tree, or its fruit when ripe, or burnt umber. What the hell is umber anyway, and why would anybody burn it? I have no idea, but Wikipedia does, including the fact that it is darker than the other earth pigments sienna and ochre.

Lakoff and Johnson have a bone to pick with the traditional view of metaphor, much of which they attribute to Aristotle. Here is how they describe that traditional view: 1. Metaphor is a matter of words, not thought. Metaphor occurs when a word is applied not to what it normally designates, but to something else. 2. Metaphorical language is not part of ordinary conventional language. Instead, it is novel and typically arises in poetry, rhetorical attempts at persuasion, and scientific discovery. 3. Metaphorical language is deviant. In metaphor, words are not used in their proper senses. 4. Conventional metaphorical expressions in ordinary everyday language are "dead metaphors," that is, expressions that once were metaphorical, but have become frozen into literal expressions. 5. Metaphors express similarities. That is, there are preexisting similarities between what words normally designate and what they designate when they are used metaphorically. This is not an ac...

Writing in today's NYT, Tim Requarth and Megan Meehan report on an intriguing finding about the development of speech in human babies - and clues that were found from the study of birdsong. Babies learn to speak months after they begin to understand language. As they are learning to talk, they babble, repeating the same syllable (“da-da-da”) or combining syllables into a string (“da-do-da-do”). But when babies babble, what are they actually doing? And why does it take them so long to begin speaking? Insights into these mysteries of human language acquisition are now coming from a surprising source: songbirds. It seems that sound transitions are hard, and learning them takes a lot of practice. The study also reveals a lot about the intricate genetic program that orchestrates the development of speech and language, and it's deep evolutionary roots. The evolution of birds and people separated 200 million years or so ago, but we still share some vocalization genes.

...He loaded the hay into the wagon. ...He poured the water into the glass. These two construction look very similar. We can capture the same concept as the first sentence in the following: ... He loaded the wagon with hay. So what about: ... He poured the glass with water. If you are a native speaker of English, the latter will probably clunk in your head like a bowl full of rocks. So what's up with that? According to Steven Pinker in The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature , the answer tells us a lot about language and even more about how the mind works. I won't try to explain the somewhat complicated answer, at least not at this early stage of my reading, but it has to do with the way our brains model the world. Our minds contain an innate model of the physics of space, time and other matters, he says, and that model has a lot to say about how we think and speak.

I have concluded that learning a foreign language is actually impossible. I base this theory on the fact that I have repeatedly failed, and I used to consider myself smart. This hypothesis has a number of easily testable conclusions, so it has the key attribute of a proper Kuhnian theory, unlike some others I could mention. One clear implication should be there aren't actually any people who speak multiple languages. Of course there do appear to be such people, and I even know a few, some of whom appear to read this blog. At this point I need to become a Diracian, and not let a beautiful theory be slain by a few inconvenient facts. One possible explanation is that those who actually appear to speak two languages, or more, are actually multiple people, perhaps identical siblings separated at birth. Or perhaps they hold a ring of power, and hence have the power to understand the thoughts of others. Just in case, while my theory awaits scientific confirmation, I'm going to ...

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master – that’s all James is amused by the American media: It does amuse me as an external observer to hear terms such as "socialist", "Marxist", "Maoist", "Nazi", "Fascist", etc bandied around in some areas of the US media, seemingly interchangeably and without any justification. Also, in the US it seems that "conservative" is good and "liberal" is evil? How is liberal defined? To which I say, if you think it's so damn funny why don't you just take back Rupert f*****g Murdoch - whose minions are among the worst practitioners. I'm pretty sure, though, that this business of trying to tar your opponents with whatever word of bad rep...