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When you come across text you can’t read, can you at least identify the language? Maybe sometimes? In today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss, you’ll be given characters from languages not easily typed on your keyboard, and you match it to the language. It’s not easy -I only got three right. Surely you can beat that! Link
by Richard Lederer
The Comedian of the Keyboard, also known as The Unmelancholy Dane, exited the earthly stage December 23rd, 2000. Victor Borge, the irrepressible musical humorist, didn’t quite make it into the true third millennium, but he lived almost 92 very full years and performed more than a 100 nights a year right up until the spotlight winked out.
Borge left the world a triple legacy. Born in Copenhagen to a family of musicians, Borge became a fine pianist and conductor. Too, he was that rare comedian who never used foul language and never made fun of anyone. “The smile is the shortest distance between two people,” he observed. Most astonishingly, he became a genius in his second language — English, which he learned by spending day after day in movie theaters.
Many years ago, Victor Borge created the game of inflationary language. Since prices keep going up, he reasoned, why shouldn’t language go up too? In English, there are words that contain the sounds of numbers, such as “wonder” (one), “before” (four) and “decorate” (eight). If we inflate each sound by one number, we come up with a string of puns — “twoder,” “befive” and “decornine.”
Here is a story based on Borge’s idea. This tale invites you to read and hear inflationary language in all its inflated wonder — oops, make that “twoder” and to remember the linguistically pyrotechnic genius of The Clown Prince of Denmark.
Twice upon a time there lived a boy named Jack in the twoderful land of Califivenia. Two day Jack, a double-minded lad, decided three go fifth three seek his fivetune.
After making sure that Jack nine a sandwich and drank some Eight-Up, his mother elevenderly said, “Threedeloo, threedeloo. Try three be back by next Threesday.” Then she cheered, “Three, five, seven, nine. Who do we apprecinine? Jack, Jack, yay!”
Jack set fifth and soon met a man wearing a four-piece suit and a threepee. Fifthrightly Jack asked the man, “I’m a Califivenian. Are you two three?”
“Cerelevenly,” replied the man, offiving the high six. “Anytwo five elevennis?”
“Not threeday,” answered Jack inelevently. “But can you help me three locnine my fivetune?”
“Sure,” said the man. “Let me sell you these twoderful beans.”
Jack’s inthreeition told him that the man was a three-faced triple-crosser. Elevensely Jack shouted, “I’m not behind the nine ball. I’m a college gradunine, and I know what rights our fivefathers crenined in the Constithreetion. Now let’s get down three baseven about these beans.”
The man tripled over with laughter. “Now hold on a third,” he responded. “There’s no need three make such a three-do about these beans. If you twot, I’ll give them three you.”
Well, there’s no need three elabornine on the rest of the tale. Jack oned in on the giant and two the battle for the golden eggs. His mother and he lived happily fivever after — and so on, and so on, and so fifth.
© Copyright 2000 Annals of Improbable Research (AIR)
_____________________
This article is republished with permission from the Jan-Feb 2001 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!
Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.
Whaaat? You didn’t know that prairie dogs have their own language? (Cue Dramatic Prairie Dog clip)
Professor Con Slobodchikoff of Nothern Arizona University spent 30 years studying "prairiedogese" and cracked the secret of how prairie dogs communicate with each other:
During his analysis, Slobodchikoff noticed something: Even though the human call was consistently different from the other calls, there was still significant variation between the individual human calls. He began to wonder whether the little rodents could possibly be describing their predators — not just differentiating hawk from human, but actually saying something about the particular human or coyote or hawk that was approaching.
So he devised a test. He had four (human) volunteers walk through a prairie dog village, and he dressed all the humans exactly the same — except for their shirts. Each volunteer walked through the community four times: once in a blue shirt, once in a yellow, once in green and once in gray.
He found, to his delight, that the calls broke down into groups based on the color of the volunteer’s shirt. "I was astounded," says Slobodchikoff. But what astounded him even more, was that further analysis revealed that the calls also clustered based on other characteristics, like the height of the human. "Essentially they were saying, ‘Here comes the tall human in the blue,’ versus, ‘Here comes the short human in the yellow,’ " says Slobodchikoff.
Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich of NPR’s Morning Edition have the fascinating story, including a Flash feature where you can hear the different prairie dog calls: Link
Stanford University has an ongoing study of how children learn language. Part of that study is how they learn color names. They found it to be difficult for a lot of children -in fact, their parents worried that they might be colorblind!
As it happens, English color words may be especially difficult to learn, because in English we throw in a curve ball: we like to use color words “prenominally,” meaning before nouns. So, we’ll often say things like “the red balloon,” instead of using the postnominal construction, “the balloon is red.”
Why does this matter? It has to do with how attention works. In conversation, people have to track what’s being talked about, and they often do this visually. This is particularly so if they’re trying to make sense of whatever it is someone is going on about. Indeed, should I start blathering about “the old mumpsimus in the corner” you’re apt to begin discretely looking around for the mystery person or object.
Kids do the exact same thing, only more avidly, because they have much, much more to learn about. That means that when you stick the noun before the color word, you can successfully narrow their focus to whatever it is you’re talking about before you hit them with the color. Say “the balloon is red,” for example, and you will have helped to narrow “red-ness” to being an attribute of the balloon, and not some general property of the world at large. This helps kids discern what about the balloon makes it red.
When the researchers switched the color and noun, they found a significant improvement in performance over the children’s baseline performances, compared to the children who received prenominal training. Link -via TYWKIWBI
(Image credit: Flickr user wine me up)
Archaeologists find them; linguists try to read them, but even after years of study, some writings are indecipherable. Some are from unknown languages, others were written in code. All are baffling. An example is the Rohonc Codex.
This most peculiar script is written from right to left, and seems to mix up runes, straight and rounded characters in the style of Old Hungarian – but it defies all attempts at translation. This bamboozling manuscript was given to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences by Count Battyany in 1852, and is is believed to have been written in medieval times. Appearing to be hand-scripted, and illustrated with crude black and white sketches, the writing is simply not decipherable in any way. However, code-breakers have managed to at least ascertain that the language involved consists of 42 letters and over 200 different symbols, some non-alphabetic, as well as other symbols which see only occasional use.
The Rohonc Codex is just one of seven untranslated manuscripts in this list at Environmental Graffiti. Link -via the Presurfer
Professors and students at Budapest’s ELTE-MTA Theoretical Linguistics Programme celebrate the 20th anniversary of their department with a cover of “We Are The World.”
There comes a time
When we heed a certain call,
When linguists must come together as one.
There are people speaking,
They bind and c-command;
It’s grammar, the greatest gift of all.
We can’t go on
Pretending day by day
That we know our language works in the brain.
We are all a part of
God’s linguist family,
And the truth, you know, grammar’s all we need.
The full lyrics are available in the YouTube pulldown box. Via Language Log, where there is some relevant commentary.
Animals communicate with each other in ways we can’t imagine, but there are a few we’ve figured out. Oh, we can’t translate everything yet, but we know how some do it. Environmental Graffiti looks at five animals that have their own languages. For example, some frogs chatter away in a language we can’t even hear!
The frogs’ calls have to compete with other animals’ loud signals. These calls are perceived as very loud to humans. However, there are frogs that communicate only through ultrasound. Their frequency is too high for the human ear to hear. The Huia cavitympanum species that lives in Borneo is the only species known to man that communicates only through high-pitched sounds.
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There are many familiar terms you read on the internet, but if they came up in conversation, you might not pronounce the words the same as other people do -because you’ve only seen them typed! Geekosystem has a pronunciation guide for 21 words and phrases that you may not have ever heard spoken out loud. But if you ever do, you’ll be correct. Take, for example, the word “Cthulhu”.
4) Cthulhu
Created by H.P. Lovecraft, Cthulhu is a humongous cosmic entity resembling a blend of an octopus, dragon and humanoid. Bordering on a ridiculous mishmash that would be found laughable in today’s horror scene, Cthulhu is still widely-known and loved amongst literature buffs and geeks the world over.
* The Mystery: Probably doesn’t need a list of common mispronunciations, but it’s safe to say every letter in the name other than the “l” can be pronounced one way or another.
* The Answer: Wikipedia says H.P. Lovecraft once transcribed the pronunciation as “Khlûl-hloo,” though didn’t pronounce it that way at other times. Now commonplace, the accepted pronunciation is “ka-thoo-loo;” that is, if you accept a pronunciation from a source other than the creator of the word. Lovecraft didn’t seem to have any consistent way of pronouncing it though, so we’re all better off settling on the common way described above.
You’ll also want to check out the best way to pronounce FAQ, Ubuntu, and meme, among others. Link
(Image credit: the NeatoShop)
Ben Zimmer has an article at The New York Times addressing a person using the word “we”, sometimes referred to as “the royal we”, when speaking or writing. When it’s not clear who the person is speaking for, it can sound downright pompous. A New York senator, Roscoe Conkling, once said, “Yes, I have noticed there are three classes of people who always say ‘we’ instead of ‘I.’ They are emperors, editors and men with a tapeworm.”
What is it about the presumptuous use of we that inspires so much outrage, facetious or otherwise? The roots of these adverse reactions lie in the haughtiness of the majestic plural, or royal we, shared by languages of Western Europe since the days of ancient Roman emperors. British sovereigns have historically referred to themselves in the plural, but by the time of Queen Victoria, it was already a figure of fun. Victoria, of course, is remembered for the chilly line, “We are not amused” — her reaction, according to Sir Arthur Helps, the clerk of the privy council, to his telling of a joke to the ladies in waiting at a royal dinner party. Margaret Thatcher invited mocking Victorian comparisons when she announced in 1989, “We have become a grandmother.”
Nameless authors of editorials may find the pronoun we handy for representing the voice of collective wisdom, but their word choice opens them up to charges of gutlessness and self-importance. As the fiery preacher Thomas De Witt Talmage wrote in 1875: “They who go skulking about under the editorial ‘we,’ unwilling to acknowledge their identity, are more fit for Delaware whipping-posts than the position of public educators.”
I have to admit I have done this here at Neatorama, and I assure you that it is only in circumstances where I am speaking on behalf of the blog, meaning that Alex and I, and sometimes others as well, are in agreement. Forgive me? Link -via Carl Zimmer
by Bethany Halford (“BH”) with an Introduction and Commentary
by Steve Nadis (“SN”) Followed by a Rejoinder by the Aforementioned BH
EDITOR’S NOTE: The unusual format and to some degree the content of this article, including personal and even interpersonal commentary, reflects the persistent, entangled nature of the subject.
For the past 15 years, I’ve been tilting at windmills bearing the name “Holy Grail”—words that are all too familiar in the scientific literature and other realms of hyperbolic prose. I have made it my life’s work to scour scientific periodicals for references to said term in order to show the extent to which it has been misused, overused, and abused, with the ultimate hope being that scientists and science journalists alike will show more restraint in the future when describing “revolutionary new breakthroughs” or lofty, elusive goals not yet attained.
This is not a field for those eager to get rich quick. There’s not much money to be had in the grail-hunting enterprise, nor much glory to be found either—except in extremely rarified circles among those in the know. Indeed, most civilians fail to recognize the value of my preoccupation, nor do they consider it a valid occupation or even an avocation.
For most of this time, it has been a solitary pursuit laced with private curses, ad hominem remarks (at my own expense), and self-congratulatory chuckles. I even dislocated my shoulder once patting myself on the back. Putting it in literary terms, I have been Don Quixote without Sancho Panza. In dance terms, I have been Fred Astaire without Ginger Rogers. And in terms of refreshing alcoholic beverages that are perfect for the casual get-together or formal office party, I have been Martini without Rossi. (Or Rowan without Martin, or Martin without Lewis, or Lewis without Clark).
But slowly things have been changing for the better, perhaps a result of frequent announcements regarding the grail in this very journal, the Annals itself.1 They say it takes a village, and although a village is not taking shape here, a community is. In the past couple of years, it seems that some people are finally “getting it”—people like Charles Petit, who wrote in the Knight Science Journalism Tracker in 2007: “What is it with any and all holy grails as ever-potent catnip for metaphor-hungry science and medical writers? How is it that French poetry, British Arthurian literature, and the romance of knights off on quests—one that not even Monty Python’s satire could cure—took such deep root in the imaginations of some writers in their youths (and of their sources)?”
Petit’s tirade was spurred by a BBC news story that described the development of artificial blood vessels as “one of the holy grails of regenerative medicine.” Is it, Petit asked, “just one of several such grails? And this in just one subspecialty? Well, one takes one’s holy grails where one finds them. Somebody should do a survey. There must be scads of them. How many holy grails does it take to make them, you know, plain old grails?”2
In 2008, Guardian columnist Tim Radford wrote: “British journalists have invoked the holy grail more than 1,000 times in the last 12 months. I have, almost certainly, evoked the same divinely-touched chalice, rightly celebrated in Arthurian legend, in some inappropriate context. We are all guilty… Grail imagery occurs with astonishing frequency in the scholarly press. Somewhere in the medical literature, I suspect, lurks a paper about the holy grail of hip replacement.”3 (And, yes, Mr. Radford, you are correct. But there is not one paper about the holy grail of hip replacement, my cher comrade in arms. There are many.)
The use of Ms. as a title for a woman who is either married or not goes back a lot further than you may think. The Oxford University Press found an example printed in a newspaper in 1885.
Ever since “Ms.” emerged as a marriage-neutral alternative to “Miss” and “Mrs.” in the 1970s, linguists have been trying to trace the origins of this new honorific. It turns out that “Ms.” is not so new after all. The form goes back at least to the 1760s, when it served as an abbreviation for “Mistress” (remember Shakespeare’s Mistress Quickly?) and for “Miss,” already a shortened form of “Mistress,” which was also sometimes spelled “Mis.” The few early instances of “Ms.” carried no particular information about matrimonial status (it was used for single or for married women) and no political statement about gender equality. Eventually “Miss” and “Mrs.” emerged as the standard honorifics for women, just as “Mr.” was used for men (“Master,” from which “Mr.” derives, was often used for boys, though it’s not common today). While “Miss” was often prefixed to the names of unmarried women or used for young women or girls, it could also refer to married women. And “Mrs.,” typically reserved for married women, did not always signal marital status (for example, widows and divorced women often continued to use “Mrs.”). The spread of “Ms.” over the past forty years both simplifies and complicates the title paradigm.
But the term goes back even further, as Ms. was used on a tombstone in 1767 for Ms. Sarah Spooner, which may be a case of saving room. Link -via TYWKIWDBI
Every time we blog about an octopus, or rather, more than one octopus, we can count on a debate in the comments about the proper plural form for the animal. Here’s the real scoop from Kory Stamper, who is an Associate Editor at Merriam-Webster, the dictionary company. -via Holy Kaw!
Do you pronounce “often” with the “t”? Boston Globe columnist Jan Freeman noticed that although the “t” fell silent in the 15th century, it appears to be coming back, at least among college students. It may sound pretentious, but she asks us to be kind.
Pretentious pronunciation surely exists — I sympathize with McIntyre’s aversion to “Bach uttered as if the announcer suffered from catarrh, or a Spanish name pronounced as if the studio were in the foothills of Andaluthia.” But I think that in general, we’re much too eager to label people dimwits or social climbers on the basis of pronunciations they probably acquired in the usual way — by imitating the people they talk to.
More at the delightfully-named blog Throw Grammar From The Train. Link -via TYWKIWDBI
Many words are born from the name of the person associated with what that word means. An eponym is a word derived from a person’s name, whether real or fictional. In this Lunchtime Quiz from mental_floss, you’ll be given a word definition and a clue about the person, and you figure out what what the word is. Simple? Not exactly! I scored 70%, which would have been 80% if I could spell correctly. Link
Neatoramanaut SenorMysterioso liked the creature the Alot a lot! He even made one of his own, for a competition among a knitting group called Knit Knack. See the winner and the other runner-up in this post. You can see more of this alot at SenorMysterioso’s Flickr stream. Link
At NeatoBambino, we find out there are children’s songs and lullabies in the Klingon language. Sing them to your child, and he or she may end up like the baby in the included video! Link
Almost every aspect of war spawns new words, and, over time, many of them slip into everyday use. Sometimes, they even become downright peaceful in the process. For instance, triumph used to mean a victory ceremony for Roman conquerers, and skedaddle signified retreat during the Civil War. And if you’ve ever had a snafu (“Situation Normal: All F’ed Up”), then you owe a debt to the WWI soldiers who invented the acronym to describe the trenches. With each passing conflict, the list of pacified war words gets longer and longer.
undermine: If your colleagues constantly undermine you, just be glad they aren’t doing so in the traditional sense. Undermine, a word that dates back to the 14th century, was once a military term for digging a clandestine passage under a building to sneak up on the enemy. The term quickly turned metaphorical, but in Shakespeare’s day, its literal meaning was still commonly known. He even playe with it in All’s Well That Ends Well , when the maiden Helena asks a soldier if there’s a way to safeguard her virginity. He replies, “There is none: man, sitting down before you, will undermine you, and blow you up.”
fleabag: Starting in the 1830s, a fleabag was a soldier’s bed. Although the word fleabag now seems wedded to hotel, it can be applied more broadly, as in the 1958 example for the Oxford English Dictionary, “God, how I hated Paris! Paris was one big flea-bag.”
basket case: Today, a basket case is simply a neurotic person, but during WWII, it meant a living soldier who had lost all his limbs and was brought home in a basket. The United States military denies that real baskets were ever used to carry soldiers. Regardless, the original meaning of the word is still gruesome.
(Image credit: Flickr user drakegoodman)
flak:Celebrities catch a lot of flak for idiotic behavior, but contemporary flak isn’t what it used to be. When the term originated in the 1930s, it was short for fliegerabwehrkanone, the German word for anti-aircraft guns. After a generation, the meaning shifted so that catching flak now means absorbing criticism instead of cannonfire.
gung ho: You may be gung ho about collecting stamps, playing solitaire, or other individual pursuits, but originally the term was more applicable to teams. The U.S. Marines first used it a as a slogan during World War II, after general Evans Carlson adapted the Chinese kung ho, which means “work in harmony”. While the teamwork element of the definition has faded, the enthusiasm bit has certainly remained.
fobbit, hillbilly armor, and IED: The war in Iraq is contributing its own expressions. A popular word on the rise is fobbit, a term that combines FOB (forward operating base) with hobbit. The word is a derogatory term for soldiers who stay too close to base and help themselves to three square meals a day. Another expression gaining steam is hillbilly armor, a term for scraps used to bulletproof vehicles.
Some words have already entered civilian life. IEDS, or improvised explosive devices, refer to the homemade bombs created by terrorists and insurgents. A recent GQ article about inappropriate office-party behavior uses it like this: “The workplace minefield is hard enough to negotiate without planting your own IEDs.” So, what are the chances any of these new words will stick around? Who knows? The only thing that’s certain is that as long as there are new wars, new words will crop up, too.
___________________________
How Violence Increases Our Vocabulary was written by Mark Peters. It is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the May/June 2008 issue of mental_floss magazine.
Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ entertaining website and blog for more fun stuff!
Cake Wrecks has a roundup of tragic cakes specifically for school events: back to school, the last day of school, graduation, teacher training, or in the case of the cake pictured, a special lesson in history (I think). Did I spell all those words right? I wouldn’t want these cakes to rub off on me! Link
Allie notices bad grammar and lazy typing. One common mistake we see a lot is to make the words “a lot” into one word, but Allie takes this particular mistake in stride. So that we may all enjoy the joke, she illustrated the Alot.
The Alot is an imaginary creature that I made up to help me deal with my compulsive need to correct other people’s grammar. It kind of looks like a cross between a bear, a yak and a pug, and it has provided hours of entertainment for me in a situation where I’d normally be left feeling angry and disillusioned with the world.
See the Alot in many different situations at Hyperbole and a Half. Link -via Buzzfeed
Check out some clever words to describe the way kids exasperate their parents. My kids have outgrown most of these phases, but I remember them well! Link
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The Art of Manliness has a glossary of manly terms used over 100 years ago. Some terms survived well into the 20th century; I’ve used “a month of Sundays” myself. Others are strange but maybe you can guess the meanings, as in “Shut your bone box, you saucebox, or my bunch of fives will give you a fizzing blinker!” Link -via Boing Boing
I don’t understand much Japanese, but part of this conversation is in cat language. -via Arbroath
“Crash Blossoms” are ambiguous headlines that can be quite funny. They result from the space-saving technique of leaving out articles, conjunctions, and sometimes even verbs.
For years, there was no good name for these double-take headlines. Last August, however, one emerged in the Testy Copy Editors online discussion forum. Mike O’Connell, an American editor based in Sapporo, Japan, spotted the headline “Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms” and wondered, “What’s a crash blossom?” (The article, from the newspaper Japan Today, described the successful musical career of Diana Yukawa, whose father died in a 1985 Japan Airlines plane crash.) Another participant in the forum, Dan Bloom, suggested that “crash blossoms” could be used as a label for such infelicitous headlines that encourage alternate readings, and news of the neologism quickly spread.
My favorite example from the article is “British Left Waffles on Falklands.” Link
Crash Blossoms is a blog that collects these headlines for your amusement. Link -via Metafilter
The Chaos is a poem often used to demonstrate how difficult it is to pronounce words in English, as the spelling and pronunciation varies so. It was written by Dr. Gerard Nolst Trenité, who first published it in 1909, then revised and lengthened it several times before his death in 1946. More lines were added posthumously. The Spelling Society published The Chaos in its entirety. Here are the first few (and the easiest) lines:
Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;Tear in eye, your dress you’ll tear;
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
The poem is now 274 lines long, meant to be read out loud. How much of it can you manage before mispronouncing something? Link -via Geeks Are Sexy
“95% to 98% of people choose kiki for the angular shape and bouba for the rounded one… Even 2.5 year-old children (too young to read) show this effect.”
“Ramachandran and Hubbard suggest the kiki/bouba effect has implications for the evolution of language, because the naming of objects is not completely arbitrary. The rounded shape may intuitively be named bouba because the mouth makes a more rounded shape to produce that sound, while a more taut, angular mouth shape is needed to articulate kiki. The sound of K is also harder and more forceful than that of B. Such “synesthesia-like mappings” suggest that this effect might be the neurological basis for sound symbolism, in which sounds are non-arbitrarily mapped to objects and actions in the world.”
Link.
In a recently-presented scientific paper, Ian Lancashire and Graeme Hirst from the University of Toronto’s Department of English and Department of Computer Science demonstrate changes in the vocabulary used in Agatha Christie’s later novels.
The professors digitized 14 Christie novels (and included two more available in the Gutenberg online text archive), and then, with the aid of textual-analysis software, analyzed them for “vocabulary size and richness,” an increase in repeated phrases (like “all sorts of”) and an uptick in indefinite words (“anything,” “something”) — linguistic indicators of the cognitive deficits typical of Alzheimer’s disease. The results were statistically significant; Christie’s lexicon decreased with age, while both the number of vague words she employed and phrases she repeated increased.
Further studies are planned for the works of P.D. James and Ross Macdonald.
Link, via Language Log, where there is an informed comment thread.
Campbell’s monkeys have six basic sounds they make in the wild, but they can string these six sounds together in ways that mean many different things. Researcher Karim Ouattara spent 20 months observing six families of monkeys in the Ivory Coast and figured out what many sequences of calls mean.
With no danger in sight, males make three call sequences. The first – a pair of booms – is made when the monkey is far away from the group and can’t see them. It’s a summons that draws the rest of the group towards him. Adding a krak-oo to the end of the boom pair changes its meaning. Rather than “Come here”, the signal now means “Watch out for that branch”. Whenever the males cried “Boom-boom-krak-oo”, other monkeys knew that there were falling trees or branches around (or fighting monkeys overhead that could easily lead to falling vegetation).
Interspersing the booms and krak-oos with some hok-oos changes the meaning yet again. This call means “Prepare for battle”, and it’s used when rival groups or strange males have showed up. In line with this translation, the hok-oo calls are used far more often towards the edge of the monkeys’ territories than they are in the centre. The most important thing about this is that hok-oo is essentially meaningless. The monkeys never say it in isolation – they only use it to change the meaning of another call.
As complex as their language is, Campbell’s monkeys can only communicate things that they see or experience in the present. Link
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According to a new study published in Nature, our skin helps us decipher the sounds we hear with our ears. Blindfolded volunteers listened to the “pa”, “ta”, “da”, and “ba” sounds. Unknown to the participant, a puff of air, softer than would be felt in normal conversation, accompanied some of the sounds. Sometimes the puff of air accompanied the appropriate sounds, at other times not.
The researchers found that if there was no air puff, participants misheard “pa” for “ba” and “ta” for “da” 30 to 40 percent of the time. The accuracy improved 10 to 20 percent when an air puff over the hand or neck accompanied “pa” and “ta.” No improvement occurred, however, if an air puff was sent through the tube in the ear, suggesting that the participants were not simply hearing the airflow.
The opposite effect was observed when the participants received an air puff with the inappropriate sounds— “ba” and “da.” While subjects correctly identified these sounds in about 80 percent of cases when played without the release of air, the accuracy decreased by about 10 percent if the sounds were accompanied by puffs of air.
Most of the volunteers were not consciously aware of the puffs of air. Link
No wonder learning a new language can be more difficult the older you get. We were learning our individual languages before we were even born! That’s what researchers revealed in a release today by Current Biology.
It seems that fetuses not only warm to the sound of mother’s voice as they gestate, they also are being programmed in the direct patterns inherent in certain languages. By the time we are born, our dialect is determined.
Wermke’s team recorded and analyzed the cries of 60 healthy newborns, 30 born into French-speaking families and 30 born into German-speaking families, when they were three to five days old. That analysis revealed clear differences in the shape of the newborns’ cry melodies, based on their mother tongue.
Specifically, French newborns tend to cry with a rising melody contour, whereas German newborns seem to prefer a falling melody contour in their crying. Those patterns are consistent with characteristic differences between the two languages, Wermke said.
ScienceDaily has a brief story about this new knowledge: Link
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Why is it called The Hague instead of just Hague? New York City has Manhattan and The Bronx. Why not The Manhattan? Or just Bronx? And when did The Ukraine become plain Ukraine? It turns out that place names with definite articles all have a different story to explain the name, and different languages have their own peculiar rules and exceptions for naming places.
Those who live in The Hague never stopped using an old-fashioned name that described the place according to its medieval use. We get the official name Den Haag from Des Graven Hage, which means “the counts’ hedge” and refers to the fact that Dutch noblemen once used the land for hunting.
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