robertbrook / collective / tags / language

Tagged with “language” (20) activity chart

  1. Umberto Eco | The Prague Cemetery

    Umberto Eco’s new book, The Prague Cemetery is "a novel that takes the power of fakery in history to new heights," according to the Times Literary Supplement. "This work of teasing historical pseudo-reconstruction combines an intriguing philosophy of history with an elaborate set of reflections on narrative and the nature of fiction." The author of five bestselling philosophical novels, including The Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum, and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Eco is a medievalist and semiotician at the University of Bologna in Italy.

    Interviewed by Carlin Romano, critic-at-large of The Chronicle of Higher Education 
      (recorded 11/10/2011)

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    —Huffduffed by briansuda one year ago

  2. Why Do Auctioneers Talk So Fast? (full episode) | A Way with Words

    Why do auctioneers talk so fast? Martha and Grant discuss the rapid-fire speech of auctioneers, and how it gets you to bid higher. Also, why so many books have ridiculously long titles, where you’d have sonker for dessert, and an appreciation of that children’s classic, “The Phantom Tollbooth.” Plus, “different from” vs. “different than,” the origin of suss out, words that apparently entered English in 1937, and the many names for those little gray bugs that roll up into a ball.

    Public radio’s show about words and language and how we use them, with Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett

    http://www.waywordradio.org/auctioneers/

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  3. Steven Pinker on Life Scientific

    Jim al-Khalili talks to Steven Pinker, a scientist who’s not afraid of controversy. From verbs to violence, many say his popular science books are mind-changing. He explains why toddlers say “holded” not held and “digged” rather than dug; how children’s personalities are shaped largely by their genes and why, he believes the recent rioters had plenty of self-esteem. Huffduffed from http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/tls

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    —Huffduffed by briansuda one year ago

  4. Susan Schneider, “The Language of Thought: A New Philosophical Direction

    In 1975, Jerry Fodor published a book entitled The Language of Thought, which is aptly considered one of the most important books in philosophy of mind and cognitive science of the last 50 years or so. This

    http://newbooksinphilosophy.com/2011/08/15/susan-schneider-the-language-of-thought-a-new-philosophical-direction-mit-press-2011/

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    —Huffduffed by briansuda one year ago

  5. Reith Lectures Archive: 1996 2. A Web Of Deceit

    rofessor Jean Aitchison delivers her second Reith Lecture from her series entitled ‘The Language Web’. She examines the origin of language in the human species and explains how a fresh look at the role of language has led to new ideas about how it started.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/rla76/all

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    —Huffduffed by briansuda one year ago

  6. Reith Lectures Archive: 1996 1. A Web Of Worries

    Professor Jean Aitchison delivers her first Reith Lecture from her series entitled ‘The Language Web’. She explores whether our language really is in decay and argues that we need to understand language, not try to control it.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/rla76/all

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    —Huffduffed by briansuda one year ago

  7. Reith Lectures Archive: 1996 3. Building the Web

    Professor Jean Aitchison delivers her third Reith Lecture from her series entitled ‘The Language Web’. She examines the predictable way in which the language web develops in children and how adults can help, and sometimes slow down, a child’s progress.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/rla76/all

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    —Huffduffed by briansuda one year ago

  8. Reith Lectures Archive: 1996 5. The World Wide Web

    Professor Jean Aitchison delivers her fifth and final Reith Lecture from her series entitled ‘The Language Web’. She looks at the possibilities and the pitfalls of the way we use language, and how it can shape as well as distort our view of the world.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/rla76/all

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    —Huffduffed by briansuda one year ago

  9. Reith Lectures Archive: 1996 4. A Web Of Words

    Professor Jean Aitchison delivers her fourth Reith Lecture from her series entitled ‘The Language Web’. She examines the word-learning ability inbuilt in humans, and explains how we manage to recall words at speed when we need them.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/rla76/all

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    —Huffduffed by briansuda one year ago

  10. 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 briansuda 2 years ago

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