Posts tagged “language”
Lacking Concept of Time or not
The Amondawa tribe in Amazon discovered in 1986 have no concept of abstract time according to a study from the University of Portsmouth and the Federal University of Rondonia in Brazil. We’re really not saying these are a ‘people without time’ or ‘outside time…Amondawa people, like any other people, can talk about events and sequences [...]
Bifurcation
Bivio a small town in Switzerland has just over two hundred inhabitants but the town speaks three languages, each in several different dialects. Because it is an isolated town most linguists believe it to be a relic of the multilinguistic norm in history. As today is world language day its a wonderful highlight of how [...]
Moving Forward Looking Backward
In Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, a Quechua Indian told me that everything one does in life involves looking forward while going backward simultaneously. This I didn’t understand. I said, ‘What do you mean, going backward?’And he said,’Well, it’s very simple. For us, for the Quechua, the past is in front of us. It’s in front [...]
Rosetta Stone 2.0
The Rosetta disk is an archive of 1,500 languages that can comfortably be held in the hand. The underside of the disk has, .. over 13,000 microetched pages of language documentation. Since each page is a physical rather than digital image, there is no platform or format dependency. Reading the Disk requires only optical magnification. [...]
Childs Colours
Babies see colour differently than adults researchers have found, babies brains process colour information in pre-linguistic parts of the brain, but adults process colour in linguiostic parts of the brain, which means adults see colour filtered through language. It also means at some point there is a change over in our perceptions of colour. (via) [...]
Learning Finnish # 2
I’ve started my new course at the university again learning Finnish, trying to do some basic following of the Finnish Media so below is a kind of part Linkdump part commentary on whats out there. A couple of daily free papers you get on your commute are uutislehti100 and metro (which you can download in [...]
Learning Finnish
I have just started on another Finnish course this time at Helsinki University. Finnish is a very interesting language older than other European languages and only really related to Estonian closely and Hungarian distantly, and the local myth is that its the second most difficult language to learn for an English speaker like me (the [...]