Heuser suggests that only humans have evolved four computational capacities, constituting a phylogenetic mind gap between humans and other animals.
An important perspective, go read all of it Marc Hauser offers an essay in the 9 July issue of Nature, in which he suggests points of contact between work in the generative tradition of linguistics (Chomsky, etc.) and evolutionary developmental biology research on animal forms. Just as a developing animal form faces a massive range of possible variation:
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…children are born with the capacity to acquire a wide range of possible languages, as opposed to specific languages such as English, Korean or French. This implies that a child is equipped with an abstract acquisition device, allowing the ‘growth’ of many different languages. Furthermore, as the child’s acquisition device generates a space of possible languages, something internal or external to the device creates a space of impossible languages — forms that are never entertained by the child because they are poorly designed for acquisition and externalization in linguistic communication. |
A computer scientist is helping to uncover the secrets of the inscribed symbols of the Indus
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The Indus civilization, which flourished throughout much of the third millennium B.C., was the most extensive society of its time. At its height, it encompassed an area of more than half a million square miles centered on what is today the India-Pakistan border. Remnants of the Indus have been found as far north as the Himalayas and as far south as Mumbai. It was the earliest known urban culture of the subcontinent and it boasted two large cities, one at Harappa and one at Mohenjo-daro. Yet despite its size and longevity, and despite nearly a century of archaeological investigations, much about the Indus remains shrouded in mystery. |
A few years later, Rao entered the fray. Until then, people studying the script were archaeologists, historians, linguists or cryptologists. But Rao decided to coax out the secrets of the Indus script using the tool he knew best—computer science. Read more at www.smithsonianmag.com |
“The closest translation for hello in Klingon is nuqneH —”What do you want?”). | A history of the gruff but surprisingly sophisticated invented language and the people who speak it. |
Most languages created for fictional worlds involve simple vocabulary substitutions, such as moodge for man in A Clockwork Orange, or meaningless streams of noise, like the high-pitched jabbering of the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi. Klingon is something altogether different. There is a logic behind it; a linguist doing field research among Klingon speakers would be able to work out the system and describe it as he would an exotic indigenous tongue. This is not surprising, considering that Klingon was created by Marc Okrand, a linguist whose dissertation was a grammar of a now-extinct Native American language. Read more at www.slate.com |
“Human culture seems to have gone way beyond what such a law of gravity might allow”
a fascinating post, worthwhile your time of reading Alfred Russel Wallace was the co-discoverer of natural selection. His paper provides a framework for thinking about how culture and environment constrain varieties to stay true to type and also how changes enable varieties to stray indefinitely from the original type. |
| It is now well established that language
cannot follow just any old rules. Linguists a few decades back thought there
was no limit to the variety of language, but research has since identified a
number of formal constraints that mark boundaries. Language can work within
those borders, but not cross them. The trouble with those borders is
understanding what these constraints mean psychologically and neurologically.
There must be some reason beyond the formal rules for why these constraints
existed. We hardly know how to think about these matters, let alone explain
them. A letter in the most recent issue of Nature reminds me, however,
that clues are coming in from, of all places, songbirds.Read more at www.babelsdawn.com |
“I told him to be fruitful and multiply, but not in those words.” Woody Allen Is the gap between objective and inner reality the reason we
have difficulty understanding large numbers, the way statistics works,
scientific theories like quantum
physics or how to navigate the complexities of modern society, which is so
different from a small tribe of hunter-gatherers? |
Harvard cognitive scientist and experimental psychologist, Steven Pinker’s new book, The Stuff of Thought
examines what it is we have been able to find out about the mysterious,
intuitive ways in which the human mind works using the most unique
characteristic of our species, language, as the main source of
information. |
| Deeply ingrained in all the world’s languages are conceptions about
sex, intimacy, power,fairness–as well as ideas of divinity,
degradation, and danger. |
| This intuitive model of reality is a product
of natural selection: |
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: |
| Wé cildra biddaþ þé,
éalá láréow,
þæt þú taéce ús
sprecan rihte, forþám ungelaérede
wé sindon, and gewæmmodlíce
we sprecaþ… |
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It won’t be an exaggeration if I say that English is the language of this world. Although Mandarin (Chinese) tops the list of most widely spoken languages in the world, we know that it’s English which connects people around the world. Hence it won’t harm to get a deeper understanding of this ubiquitous language and work towards improving your grammar and vocabulary. |
Visuwords
Visuwords is an awesome visual tool to find new words and improve your vocabulary. When you look up a word in this tool, it shows a neat graph which connects that word to various other words based on different relationships between them. You can hover over each word to get its definition and also zoom-in and zoom-out using your mouse wheel. It’s certainly an excellent dictionary plus thesaurus.
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| Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus |
| The creation of meaning to interpret and
communicate perceived phenomena is a fundamental trait of human intelligence.
This article explains some major ways in which this is achieved, focusing on
language and the perception of embodiment. It examines the representational
aspects of natural language, which account for the ambiguity of linguistic
signs, and describes how these manifest in metaphor, connotation and emotive
expression. The article argues that the human propensity to create meaning lies
largely in this representational ambiguity, which underlies all forms of
symbolism. However, the ambiguity of natural language has a paradoxical side,
since it is also at fault in many shortcomings of human communication, such as
misunderstanding and prejudicial stereotyping. This article argues that any
attempt to emulate human ways of thinking, for example in Artificial
Intelligence research, should take this paradoxical factor into account.See more at jetpress.org |
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