I have already touched upon how our simian relatives seem to be making strides in communication with language here. Now word comes from the Ivory Coast that it appears that the Campbell’s monkey in the Tai National Park there is able to take its simple calls (“hok hok hok!” or “boom boom”) and combine them [...]
Posts Tagged ‘language’
Monkeys Can Now String Words Together to Make Sentences
Wednesday, December 9th, 2009The Importance of Language on Websites
Friday, November 13th, 2009As I was searching for something on the Internet, I came across a very interesting point that brings up a topic of great importance for us today.
“If I can’t read it, I’m not buying it”. This is something often heard from people who are trying to make purchases online.
A lot of companies have doubts and [...]
Language Statistics
Friday, August 21st, 2009• Quantity of living languages: 6912
• Quantity of language on the verge of extinction: 516
• Language with the largest quantity of native speakers: Mandarin Chinese
• Language spoken by the largest quantity of non-natives: English (250 million native speakers versus 350 million non-native speakers)
• Country where the largest variety of languages are spoken: Papua New Guinea [...]
Two Different Internal Logics
Friday, June 19th, 2009In English, we use concision (many short words or phrases) as well as an economy of language (fewer words), the preference we demonstrate for the impersonal vision of reality (objectivity), our calls to evoke feelings (appeal to the senses, images), the abstract analysis and the lack of naming of the agent of an action (passive [...]
Colorful Language: A Synesthete’s World
Friday, March 27th, 2009Synesthesia, a peculiar neurological phenomenon whereby the stimulus of one sensory or cognitive pathway automatically and involuntarily cross-activates another sensory or cognitive pathway, is an incredibly interesting and intriguing topic which will be consuming the energies of many a researcher for the foreseeable future, and surely beyond. There are many variations of synesthesia, with grapheme [...]
President Obama and The Power of Words
Thursday, January 22nd, 2009Tuesday night, at some moment during my CNN and BBC viewing marathon of inaugural activities and the apparent zenith of Obamamania, one of the many political analysts/commentators referred to “the power of words”. Although I’ve read one of Barack’s books and seen dozens of his debates and speeches, never underwhelmed by the man’s use of [...]
Language Change and Politics:
Friday, December 5th, 2008While language change may occur at varying speeds and due to diverse and numerous causes, many changes have political roots or explanations. Much of language change, obviously, has come about from human migration and the use of a language by non-native speakers, with the influences of the phonetic, syntactic and morphological rules of the migrants [...]
Respecting minorities in multilingual environments
Friday, November 14th, 2008The history of the European continent has defined countries that we recognize as having regional languages as well as official languages. Because of that, several countries are multilingual and it is quite common to learn several languages at once and use them on a daily basis.
Within minority languages, Catalan is the language with the most [...]
