Do you ever just… crave the forest? Like you feel like you NEED to be in a forest. The crisp cold air with just a sweater on, looking at the red and orange foliage in the autumn. In the winter the frigid and empty branches. The summer all the green. The spring the smell of rain and the mud. God I love the forest.
i understand the historical reasons why English is the most common language
but if I was writing a speculative fiction novel
and I said “the language that most people learn as a second language, usually for professional reasons, is also the only one with a spelling system so terrible that spelling words correctly is a broadcasted competition”
you’d be like “extremely unrealistic 0/10”
i never thought of this, do other languages not have spelling bees?
France doesn’t have spelling bees but it does have dictation competitions, where somebody talks and you have to write down what was said. French is THAT hard that it’s a competition to just understand it properly.
I don’t know how to feel about any of this information.
People who are blind from birth will gesture when they speak. I always like pointing out this fact when I teach classes on gesture, because it gives us an an interesting perspective on how we learn and use gestures. Until now I’ve mostly cited a 1998 paper from Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow that analysed the gestures and speech of young blind people. Not only do blind people gesture, but the frequency and types of gestures they use does not appear to differ greatly from how sighted people gesture. If people learn gesture without ever seeing a gesture (and, most likely, never being shown), then there must be something about learning a language that means you get gestures as a bonus.
Blind people will even gesture when talking to other blind people, and sighted people will gesture when speaking on the phone - so we know that people don’t only gesture when they speak to someone who can see their gestures.
Earlier this year a new paper came out that adds to this story. Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow looked at the gestures of blind speakers of Turkish and English, to see if the *way* they gestured was different to sighted speakers of those languages. Some of the sighted speakers were blindfolded and others left able to see their conversation partner.
Turkish and English were chosen, because it has already been established that speakers of those languages consistently gesture differently when talking about videos of items moving. English speakers will be more likely to show the manner (e.g. ‘rolling’ or bouncing’) and trajectory (e.g. ‘left to right’, ‘downwards’) together in one gesture, and Turkish speakers will show these features as two separate gestures. This reflects the fact that English ‘roll down’ is one verbal clause, while in Turkish the equivalent would be yuvarlanarak iniyor, which translates as two verbs ‘rolling descending’.
Since we know that blind people do gesture, Özçalışkan’s team wanted to figure out if they gestured like other speakers of their language. Did the blind Turkish speakers separate the manner and trajectory of their gestures like their verbs? Did English speakers combine them? Of course, the standard methodology of showing videos wouldn’t work with blind participants, so the researchers built three dimensional models of events for people to feel before they discussed them.
The results showed that blind Turkish speakers gesture like their sighted counterparts, and the same for English speakers. All Turkish speakers gestured significantly differently from all English speakers, regardless of sightedness. This means that these particular gestural patterns are something that’s deeply linked to the grammatical properties of a language, and not something that we learn from looking at other speakers.
References
Jana M. Iverson & Susan Goldin-Meadow. 1998. Why people gesture when they speak. Nature, 396(6708), 228-228.
Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow. 2016. Is Seeing Gesture Necessary to Gesture
Like a Native Speaker?
Psychological Science
27(5) 737–747.
Asli Ozyurek & Sotaro Kita. 1999. Expressing manner and path in English and Turkish:
Differences in speech, gesture, and conceptualization. In Twenty-first Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 507-512). Erlbaum.
Ok, this is just *super cool*.
And implies that gestures have grammar. I mean. Holy. Shit.
That would also imply language development early in the species could have been not just a mouth / lip / tongue thing but also a body language thing, or that body language (literally) may predate it. Just - fucking *cool*.
That makes sense, since body language is a lot older than spoken language.
"Why, Sam,“ he said, “to hear you somehow makes me as merry as if the story was already written. But you’ve left out one of the chief characters; Samwise the stout-hearted. ‘I want to hear more about Sam, Dad. Why didn’t they put in more of his talk, Dad? That’s what I like, it makes me laugh. And Frodo wouldn’t have got far without Sam, would he, Dad?” "Now, Mr. Frodo,“ said Sam, “you shouldn’t make fun. I was serious.” "So was I,“ said Frodo, “and so I am. We’re going on a bit too fast. You and I, Sam, are still stuck in the worst places of the story, and it is all too likely that some will say at this point, ‘Shut the book now, Dad; we don’t want to read anymore.’”
adulthood is just a constant struggle of, “man, i want cookies for breakfast, but I also recognize this is a bad nutritional decision. On the other hand, the only one who can stop me is me. i know that fucker’s weaknesses. i could totally take me in a fight.”
frog and toad are my two remaining brain cells struggling to keep my horrible body alive
a nsa agent in a suit looking through my laptop camera: she’s on her phone…….. our data shows that she’s got tumblr open on her laptop but she has tumblr open on her phone………. double check her browser?
some nerd hired straight out of college: *types rapidly* she’s definitely got tumblr open on her laptop
the nsa agent, softly: so why is she looking at it on her phone…..
My husband and myself have served in the military. When we call home from overseas, our lines are monitored and on a short delay so no sensitive information is revealed. The line will just go dead if you say something you’re not supposed to.
Now, these calls are monitored by a department in the military called Signal corps. When we’d talk on my husband’s last deployment, we had a running joke that we said hi to “Signal Guy Fred.”
So this continued for his entire 12 month deployment, and we made sure we said hi or bye to “Signal Guy Fred” every phone call. On his final phone call before returning home we made sure to thank “Signal Guy Fred” for his time and wish him farewell.
So, before I disconnect the call, I wish “Fred” the best and thank him for his service. My phone was on speaker mode (I was cooking dinner) and my finger was hovering over the end call button when I hear the softest little, “My name’s Jason.”
