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Tagged with “language” (5) activity chart

  1. Evolving English — Steven Pinker

    Steven Pinker discusses the interplay of language and the mind and how psychological processes have shaped the English language.

    The best stuff is about using Google’s enormous database of word-from-books to track how language evolves over time, in particular the gradual erosion of irregular forms in English (keep/kept and drive/drove) in favour of their regular counterparts (beep/beeped and jive/jived).

    Which you WILL want to follow up with a visit to Google Ngrams - http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/ - essentially Google Trends but with all written words in the English language for the last 1,000 years (instead of all search terms in the last ten years).

    Mind-blowing.

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    —Huffduffed by boxman 2 years ago

  2. Lera Boroditsky: How Language Shapes Thought — The Long Now

    Languages are Parallel Universes

    "To have a second language is to have a second soul," said Charlemagne around 800 AD. "Each language has its own cognitive toolkit," said psychologist/linguist Lera Boroditsky in 2010 AD.

    Different languages handle verbs, distinctions, gender, time, space, metaphor, and agency differently, and those differences, her research shows, make people think and act differently.

    http://longnow.org/seminars/02010/oct/26/how-language-shapes-thought/

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    —Huffduffed by boxman 2 years ago

  3. Signing, Singing, Speaking: How Language Evolved : NPR

    Humans evolved a brain with an extraordinary knack for language, but just how and when we began using language is still largely a mystery. Early human communication may have been in sign language or song, and scientists are studying other animals to learn how human language evolved.

    http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129155123

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    —Huffduffed by boxman 2 years ago

  4. Proust and the Squid - Maryanne Wolf

    Brain science podcast and interview with Maryanne Wolf - how the brain processes language.

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    —Huffduffed by boxman 2 years ago

  5. The Stuff of Thought: Language as a window into human nature

    With Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.

    Chair: Matthew Taylor, chief executive, RSA

    For Steven Pinker, the brilliance of the mind lies in the way it uses just two processes to turn the finite building blocks of our language into infinite meanings. The first is metaphor: we take a concrete idea and use it as a stand-in for abstract thoughts. The second is combination: we combine ideas according to rules, like the syntactic rules of language, to create new thoughts out of old ones.

    How can a choice of metaphors start a war, impeach a president, or win an election? How does a mind that evolved to think about rocks and plants and enemies think about love and physics and democracy? How do we control the amount of information that we absorb? And what good does this actually do us?

    Join Steven Pinker as he tries to answer these questions and many more, unlocking the hidden workings of our thoughts, our emotions and our social relationships and showing us that language really can tell us unexpected and fascinating things about ourselves.

    From: http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/the-stuff-of-thought-language-as-a-window-into-human-nature

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    —Huffduffed by boxman 3 years ago