American Buddhist Net

By Tia Ghose
July 7th, 2008

It may be time to rethink the stereotype of grunting, wordless Neandertals. The prehistoric humans may have been quite chatty — at least if the ear canals of their ancestors are any indication.

The findings suggest human speech may have originated earlier than some researchers contend. Anthropologists disagree about whether language sprang up rapidly around 50,000 years ago or emerged more gradually over a longer period of time, says Rolf Quam, a paleoanthropologist at the American Natural History Museum in New York and coauthor of the new study.

...If H. heidelbergensis did have modern hearing capacity, however, it’s logical to assume they had a primitive form of human communication, he adds. Though it’s possible that H. heidelbergensis could hear in that frequency range but didn’t use that ability for anything special, “sensory systems are extremely neurologically expensive,” Coleman says. It’s unlikely that the body would invest the resources in maintaining such a system if it didn’t serve a purpose, he says.

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By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Last Updated: 12:01pm BST 01/07/2008

When people can only communicate with hand gestures, they speak a kind of "universal language" says a new study.

To help settle a long-running dispute about whether language influences the way we think, psychologists tested 40 speakers of four different languages: 10 English, 10 Mandarin Chinese, 10 Spanish and 10 Turkish speakers, first asking them to describe an action in a video in speech, then only with gestures.

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Sunday, July 6, 2008
By ROGER PULVERS

For years I have been watching from the sidelines as the opponents battle it out. For the players this fight will go on and on, and the theater of war is right here.

This is a linguistic war, but it naturally involves archaeology, history, religion and a host of wounded egos. The question to be decided is: What exactly are the origins of the Japanese language?

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Aaron Delwiche

Propaganda can be as blatant as a swastika or as subtle as a joke. Its persuasive techniques are regularly applied by politicians, advertisers, journalists, radio personalities, and others who are interested in influencing human behavior. Propagandistic messages can be used to accomplish positive social ends, as in campaigns to reduce drunk driving, but they are also used to win elections and to sell malt liquor.

"Every day we are bombarded with one persuasive communication after another. These appeals persuade not through the give-and-take of argument and debate, but through the manipulation of symbols and of our most basic human emotions. For better or worse, ours is an age of propaganda." (Pratkanis and Aronson, 1991).

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The distinctions detailed in this story seem to me to be based more on linguistic conventions than intuition. When we say a corporation "wants" or "plans" or "thinks," we mean that decision-makers are going to do something directed toward a discreet, measurable, objective outcome (more sales, new product, etc.). We do not normally say that a corporation "feels" good or bad because feelings are subjective, transitory, and rarely understood to be causes of measurable, objective outcomes. We normally say, rather, that a corporation is "disorganized" or "trying to recover from" or "confident that." We do allow the stock market to be "bearish" or "bulllish," but normally it is investors who are "elated" or "timid" or "chastened." This is because it is widely recognized that markets are very much driven by collective emotions, while corporations are generally understood to be directed by a few people at the top. We do allow crowds to be moody--"angry," "restive," festive," etc. People can fairly often be heard to say that their cars are "happy" or "grateful" after an oil change, or words to that effect. There is a good deal of literature that claims that God "loves" us or that He is "lonely" or "sad" when we turn away from Him. He surely gets "angry" with us, as He well should. As for robots or computers, the distinction may be due more to the newness of the machines and the way they look. Most all of us can and will attribute emotions to insensate game avatars or evil intent to a computer virus. I treat insects as if they feel, and believe I can objectively observe at least panic and relief when one is trapped in a room and then finds the open door. As for lobsters thrown into boiling water, if you have ever witnessed that you must have felt the animal's pain and suffering as its claws strained against the side of the vessel. Years ago, I became a vegetarian after hearing crabs struggle in boiling water. ABN
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Our intuitions about consciousness in other beings and objects reveal a lot about how we think.

By Joshua Knobe
June 24, 2008

Can a lobster ever truly have any emotions? What about a beetle? Or a sophisticated computer? The only way to resolve these questions conclusively would be to engage in serious scientific inquiry—but even before studying the scientific literature, many people have pretty clear intuitions about what the answers are going to be. A person might just look at a computer and feel certain that it couldn’t possibly be feeling pleasure, pain or anything at all. That’s why we don’t mind throwing a broken computer in the trash. Likewise, most people don’t worry too much about a lobster feeling angst about its impending doom when they put one into a pot of boiling water. In the jargon of philosophy, these intuitions we have about whether a creature or thing is capable of feelings or subjective experiences—such as the experience of seeing red or tasting a peach—are called “intuitions about phenomenal consciousness.”

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By Michael Erard Email 06.23.08

The targeted offenses: IF YOU ARE STOLEN, CALL THE POLICE AT ONCE. PLEASE OMNIVOROUSLY PUT THE WASTE IN GARBAGE CAN. DEFORMED MAN LAVATORY. For the past 18 months, teams of language police have been scouring Beijing on a mission to wipe out all such traces of bad English signage before the Olympics come to town in August. They're the type of goofy transgressions that we in the English homelands love to poke fun at, devoting entire Web sites to so-called Chinglish. (By the way, that last phrase means "handicapped bathroom.")

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Jun 24, 2008

NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - People who are bicultural and speak two languages may unconsciously change their personality when they switch languages, according to a U.S. study.

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June 7, 2008
By SIMON ROMERO

“SOMEWHERE in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago.”

Simple enough, right? But not for Demetrio Túpac Yupanqui.

Instead, he regales visitors to his home here in this gritty port city on Lima’s edge with his Quechua version of the opening words of “Don Quixote”: “Huh k’iti, la Mancha llahta suyupin, mana yuyarina markapin, yaqa kay watakuna kama, huh axllasqa wiraqucha.”

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As many American Indian languages pass away with their last few elderly speakers, so do the unusual worldviews phrases can impart.

Mon, Jun. 2, 2008
By Faye Flam

In the Lakota language, a single word expresses the awe and connectedness with nature that some feel looking at the Northern Lights. In Euchee, the language makes no distinction between humans and other animals, though it does differentiate between Euchee people and non-Euchee.

And the Koasati language of Louisiana provides no word for good-bye, since time is seen as more cyclical than linear. To end a conversation, you would say something like, "This was good."

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May. 23, 2008
Ariel David

ROME - No one can read our thoughts, for now, but some scientists believe they can at least figure out in what language we do our thinking.

Before we utter a single word, experts can gauge our mother tongue and the level of proficiency in other languages by analyzing our brain activity while we read, scientists working with Italy's National Research Council say.

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May 22nd 2008
by Abha Malpani

Learn a new language and you'll see that the first few things you remember are the insults. It's fun to insult in a foreign language and there is normally a whole lesson dedicated to them at language schools (well, there was at mine, anyway!)

Today I received in my inbox a link to this piece: "The 9 Most Devastating Insults From Around The World" -- they are really rude, no -- they are obscene and you will wonder what kind of people talk like this. Unfortunately, such phrases are an essential part of the culture of these places. Here they are:

*Warning: The rest of this post is full of bad language. If you are easily offended, don't continue reading*

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See this for more: Philip Giraldi: What FBI whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds found in translation. ABN
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Agent Youssef Says Empty Desks, Ignorance of Language Cripple Efforts

By JUSTIN ROOD and VIC WALTER
May 21, 2008

...The bureau's well-publicized troubles hiring and promoting talented foreign language speakers has also crippled its counterterrorism efforts, Youssef warned. FBI managers "rely exclusively on translation services" to understand communications from Middle Eastern terrorist operations, and FBI personnel "continue to make major mistakes" because they lack expertise in Arabic, he said.

As one consequence of these shortcomings, the bureau has "irresponsibl[y]" misidentified threats, Youssef said, adding that he was prepared to testify on the topic.

As another, Youssef said, it has come to depend too heavily on technological solutions, including aggressive electronic surveillance, which has "the potential of undermining American civil liberties."

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Locked in her Bedroom for 13 Years

On the 4th November 1970 a news bulletin announced “Officials in the Los Angeles suburb of Arcadia have taken custody of a 13 year old girl they say was kept in such isolation by her parents that she never even learned to talk. The girl still wore diapers and was uttering infantile noises when a social worker discovered the case. Authorities are hoping she may still have a normal learning capacity”.

Among the first to see the child was Temple City detective Sergeant Frank Linley “I already knew that the child was 13½ years old. I took one look at her, she wasn’t much bigger than my daughter who just turned seven, and I really had a hard time conceiving that she was the age she was meant to be. The child had obviously been severely mistreated”.

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