An Interview With Radical Linguist Noam Chomsky

Photo: John Soars/Wikimedia Commons

Discover Interview The Radical Linguist Noam Chomsky -- Discover

For centuries experts held that every language is unique. Then one day in 1956, a young linguistics professor gave a legendary presentation at the Symposium on Information Theory at MIT. He argued that every intelligible sentence conforms not only to the rules of its particular language but to a universal grammar that encompasses all languages. And rather than absorbing language from the environment and learning to communicate by imitation, children are born with the innate capacity to master language, a power imbued in our species by evolution itself. Almost overnight, linguists’ thinking began to shift.

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The Unique Ability To Spell Backwards

Health: Teen Speaks To CBS3 About Her Ability To Instantly Say Words Backwards -- CBS

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – It’s like an easy game for 14-year-old Alyssa Kramer. She can easily say words backwards in seconds. Her video on YouTube quickly got a million hits, and now she has her own channel: alyssatalkingback.com. CBS3 asked when she realized she had the special ability.

“Whenever I learned how to read, I just started doing it. I have a photographic memory, and whenever someone tells me a word, I can see it in my head. And if I want to spell it backwards then, it can flip and I’ll read it that way,” Alyssa says.

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My Comment: I just tried to do it myself .... it ain't easy.

Every 2-Year-Old Should Know At Least These 25 Words

Carla Tarantino-Marie and her 2-year-old daughter Violette, reading together. Viorel Florescu for New York Daily News

Every 2-Year-Old Should Know At Least These 25 Words: Researchers -- New York Daily News

A checklist for toddler language development

Turns out chatty toddlers who say “all gone” and “bye-bye” aren’t just cute — they’re showing off their essential language skills.

Researchers have identified 25 “must have” words that every child should be saying when they turn 2.

Kids who haven’t mastered them might not just be late talkers — they could be showing signs of autism, developmental delays or hearing problems .

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My Comment: Only 25?

Chimps Are Not Human

The Chimp They Tried To Turn Into A Human: An Extraordinary Experiment In Which Scientists Raised A Chimpanzee As Their Child... With Chilling Results -- Daily Mail

The woman volunteer thought Nim was coming to hug her, but instead the young chimp lunged, biting so deep into her cheek that his fangs pierced her mouth.

As she clutched her bleeding face, the little ape was beside himself, using the same piece of sign language again and again to attract her attention. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ he repeated.

This haunting recollection is one of many contained in a riveting new film, Project Nim, by the director of the Oscar-winning Man On Wire, about one of the most bizarre scientific experiments of recent times.

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My Comment: In today's world, these individuals would have been cited for animal abuse.

Robots Learning Their Own Language

The 'Lingodroids' Learning Language via IEEE Spectrum

Robots Learn To CreateTheir Own Spoken Language -- Popular Science

Having a computer for a brain has its perks, but it has its drawbacks as well. Language is a tough concept for robots, as words can convey the abstract as well as the concrete and robots have trouble knowing the difference (and grasping the abstract). That makes human-machine interaction less than intuitive for humans and confusing to ‘bots. But Australian researchers are hoping to change that by teaching robots to communicate verbally in a language of their own creation, the same way humans did.

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We Should Learn To Speak To Dolphins Before Talking To Aliens

To Talk With Aliens, Learn to Speak With Dolphins -- Wired Science

The Kepler Space Telescope announced a new bonanza of distant planets this month, reconfirming that solar systems, some possibly hosting life, are common in the universe.

So if humanity someday arrives at an extraterrestrial cocktail party, will we be ready to mingle? At the Wild Dolphin Project in Jupiter, Florida, researchers train for contact by trying to talk with dolphins.

Behavioral biologist Denise Herzing started studying free-ranging spotted dolphins in the Bahamas more than two decades ago. Over the years, she noticed some dolphins seeking human company, seemingly out of curiosity.

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My Comment: This is a novel idea .... but I am more hopeful that the aliens will be better at communicating to 'us' than 'us' communicating to dolphins.

Language And Toolmaking Evolved Together, Say Researchers

Researchers say early humans were limited by brain power not manual dexterity when making stone age tools. Photograph: David Sillitoe/Guardian

From Popular Mechanics:

Evolutionary advance saw stone-age humans master the art of hand-toolmaking and paved the way for language to develop.

Stone-age humans mastered the art of elegant hand-toolmaking in an evolutionary advance that boosted their brain power and potentially paved the way for language, researchers say.

The design of stone tools changed dramatically in human pre-history, beginning more than two million years ago with sharp but primitive stone flakes, and culminating in exquisite, finely honed hand axes 500,000 years ago.

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Heard For The First Time In 2,000 years: Scientists Post Readings Of Ancient Babylonian Poems Online

A clay tablet known as the Jursa tablet that proves the existence of a Babylonian official in the Bible

From The Daily Mail:

The ancient language of Babylonian can be heard for the first time in almost 2,000 years after Cambridge University scholars posted readings and poems online.

Babylonian, one of the chief languages of Ancient Mesopotamia, dates back as far as the second millennium BC but died out around 2,000 years ago.

However, Cambridge historians have resurrected the ancient tongue by discovering how the language was pronounced and spoken.

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Lost Language Unearthed In Letter

Photo: A letter discovered in northern Peru in 2008 showing a column of numbers written in Spanish and translated into a language that scholars say is now extinct, is seen in this undated photo released by archaeologists September 22, 2010. (HANDOUT)

From CNews:

LIMA - Archaeologists say scrawl on the back of a letter recovered from a 17th century dig site reveals a previously unknown language spoken by indigenous peoples in northern Peru.

A team of international archaeologists found the letter under a pile of adobe bricks in a collapsed church complex near Trujillo, 347 miles (560 km) north of Lima. The complex had been inhabited by Dominican friars for two centuries.

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Oxford English Dictionary 'Will Not Be Printed Again'

The second OED was published in 1989 Photo: GETTY

From The Telegraph:

The next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the world’s most definitive work on the language, will never be printed because of the impact of the internet on book sales.

Sales of the third edition of the vast tome have fallen due to the increasing popularity of online alternatives, according to its publisher.

A team of 80 lexicographers has been working on the third edition of the OED – known as OED3 – for the past 21 years.

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Does Langage Influence Culture?

Lost In Translation -- Wall Street Journal

New cognitive research suggests that language profoundly influences the way people see the world; a different sense of blame in Japanese and Spanish.

Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? Do they merely express thoughts, or do the structures in languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we wish to express?

Take "Humpty Dumpty sat on a..." Even this snippet of a nursery rhyme reveals how much languages can differ from one another. In English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we say "sat" rather than "sit." In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can't) change the verb to mark tense.

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Scientists Image Brain At Point When Vocal Learning Begins

High resolution in vivo images of neurons and associated dendritic spines in the brain of a juvenile songbird during the initial stages of song learning. Images taken by Todd Roberts. (Credit: Todd Roberts/Duke University Medical Center)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Feb. 19, 2010) — Duke University Medical Center scientists crowded around a laser-powered microscope in a darkened room to peer into the brain of an anesthetized juvenile songbird right after he heard an adult tutors' song for the first time.

Specifically, they wanted to see what happened to the connections between nerve cells, or synapses, in a part of the brain where the motor commands for song are thought to originate.

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The Writing On The Cave Wall

Time to look around the paintings (Image: Dozier Marc/Photolibrary)

From New Scientist:

THE first intrepid explorers to brave the 7-metre crawl through a perilously narrow tunnel leading to the Chauvet caves in southern France were rewarded with magnificent artwork to rival any modern composition. Stretching a full 3 metres in height, the paintings depict a troupe of majestic horses in deep colours, above a pair of boisterous rhinos in the midst of a fight. To the left, they found the beautiful rendering of a herd of prehistoric cows. "The horse heads just seem to leap out of the wall towards you," says Jean Clottes, former director of scientific research at the caves and one of the few people to see the paintings with his own eyes.

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Google's Handheld Translator Seeks To Cross Language Barriers

Google Android

From Popular Science:

Google's vision for a better world involves removing those pesky language barriers that keep people apart, and so the Internet search giant has begun development on a voice recognition and automatic translation system for cell phones. Such technology could either herald a new era of fruitful international collaboration or usher in new grievances and conflicts, depending on your viewpoint. The Times makes the obligatory reference to the Babel Fish of Hitchhiker's Guide that spawned bloody interstellar conflicts.

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Last Speaker Of Ancient Language Of Bo Dies In India

From The BBC:

The last speaker of an ancient language in India's Andaman Islands has died at the age of about 85, a leading linguist has told the BBC.

Professor Anvita Abbi said that the death of Boa Sr was highly significant because one of the world's oldest languages - Bo - had come to an end.

She said that India had lost an irreplaceable part of its heritage.

Languages in the Andamans are thought to originate from Africa. Some may be 70,000 years old.

The islands are often called an "anthropologist's dream" and are one of the most linguistically diverse areas of the world.

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Language Structure Is Partly Determined By Social Structure

Geographic distribution of the 2,236 languages included in the present study. (Credit: Lupyan G, Dale R (2010), PLoS One, 10.1371/journal.pone.0008559.g001)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Jan. 28, 2010) — Psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Memphis have released a new study on linguistic evolution that challenges the prominent hypothesis for why languages differ throughout the world.

The study argues that human languages may adapt more like biological organisms than previously thought and that the more common and popular the language, the simpler its construction to facilitate its survival.

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Tiny Mutation Led To Human Speech

Human speech is thought to have emerged 100,000 to 200,000 years ago, some five million years after chimps and humans took divergent paths on the tree of evolution. Photo: iStockphoto

From Cosmos:

PARIS: Two minute evolutionary changes in a gene that is otherwise identical in humans and chimps could explain why we have fully fledged power of speech while other primates do not.

The findings may also point to new drug targets for hard-to-treat diseases that disrupt speech, such as schizophrenia and autism, said a study detailed in the British journal Nature today.

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In Search Of That Word On The Tip Of Your Tongue

Jennie Pyers signs with a young deaf boy in Nicaragua. Pyers studied bilingual sign language speakers to solve the "tip of the tongue" question. Wellesley College

From USA Today:

On the tip of your tongue, that word you can't dig out. Why not?

The tip of your tongue may be the wrong place to look, psychologists suggest. They find that hearing, sign-language speakers may hold the keys to finding where those words are hiding.

"You know the word, you just can't get it out," says Jennie Pyers of Wellesley (Mass.) College. "Well, it turns out sign-language speakers have the same problem," she says. Only they are called "tip-of-the-finger" glitches, rather than "tip-of the tongue" by psychologists.

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What Country Has More English Speakers Than Any Other Country?

Preaching to the converted: Li Yang, founder of the Crazy English movement, lectures a crowd of students. SEAN GALLAGHER

Crazy English: How China's Language Teachers Became Big Celebrities -- The Independent

This year it will be announced that China now has more English speakers than any other country in the world. And such is the demand for their services that top teachers have become big stars.

"Where are you from? Do you speak English?" It's a familiar phrase near the Forbidden City in Beijing, or along the capital's Nanjing Road, as Chinese people try a standard opening gambit to spark up a conversation with a foreigner. Many visitors baulk at being approached so baldly, and are worried that it could be a scam. Very occasionally it is a con – and tourists should be wary when some nice young people offer to bring them to a tea house – but mostly the youngsters are desperate for access to real live Anglophones who can help them improve their conversational English.

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Bilinguals Are Unable To 'Turn Off' A Language Completely, Study Shows

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 19, 2009) — With a vast majority of the world speaking more than one language, it is no wonder that psychologists are interested in its effect on cognitive functioning. For instance, how does the human brain switch between languages? Are we able to seamlessly activate one language and disregard knowledge of other languages completely?

According to a recent study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, it appears humans are not actually capable of "turning off" another language entirely. Psychologists Eva Van Assche, Wouter Duyck, Robert Hartsuiker and Kevin Diependaele from Ghent University found that knowledge of a second language actually has a continuous impact on native-language reading.

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