Full article here.

TONGUE TWISTERS
Dec 17th 2009

In search of the world’s hardest language

A CERTAIN genre of books about English extols the language’s supposed
difficulty and idiosyncrasy. “Crazy English”, by an American
folk-linguist, Richard Lederer, asks “how is it that your nose can run
and your feet can smell?”. Bill Bryson’s “Mother Tongue: English and
How It Got That Way” says that “English is full of booby traps for the
unwary foreigner…Imagine being a foreigner and having to learn that
in English one tells A lie but THE truth.”

Such books are usually harmless, if slightly fact-challenged. You tell
“a” lie but “the” truth in many languages, partly because many lies
exist but truth is rather more definite. It may be natural to think
that your own tongue is complex and mysterious. But English is pretty
simple: verbs hardly conjugate; nouns pluralise easily (just add “s”,
mostly) and there are no genders to remember.

English-speakers appreciate this when they try to learn other
languages. A Spanish verb has six present-tense forms, and six each in
the preterite, imperfect, future, conditional, subjunctive and two
different past subjunctives, for a total of 48 forms. German has three
genders, seemingly so random that Mark Twain wondered why “a young lady
has no sex, but a turnip has”. (MaDCHEN is neuter, whereas STECKRuBE is
feminine.)

English spelling may be the most idiosyncratic, although French gives
it a run for the money with 13 ways to spell the sound “o”: o, ot, ots,
os, ocs, au, aux, aud, auds, eau, eaux, ho and o. “Ghoti,” as
wordsmiths have noted, could be pronounced “fish”: gh as in “cough”, o
as in “women” and ti as in “motion”. But spelling is ancillary to a
language’s real complexity; English is a relatively simple language,
absurdly spelled.

Perhaps the “hardest” language studied by many Anglophones is Latin. In
it, all nouns are marked for case, an ending that tells what function
the word has in a sentence (subject, direct object, possessive and so
on). There are six cases, and five different patterns for declining
verbs into them. This system, and its many exceptions, made for years
of classroom torture for many children. But it also gives Latin a
flexibility of word order. If the subject is marked as a subject with
an ending, it need not come at the beginning of a sentence. This
ability made many scholars of bygone days admire Latin’s majesty–and
admire themselves for mastering it. Knowing Latin (and Greek, which
presents similar problems) was long the sign of an educated person.

Yet are Latin and Greek truly hard? These two genetic cousins of
English, in the Indo-European language family, are child’s play
compared with some. Languages tend to get “harder” the farther one
moves from English and its relatives. Assessing how languages are
tricky for English-speakers gives a guide to how the world’s languages
differ overall.

Even before learning a word, the foreigner is struck by how differently
languages can sound. The uvular r’s of French and the fricative,
glottal ch’s of German (and Scots) are essential to one’s imagination
of these languages and their speakers. But sound systems get a lot more
difficult than that. Vowels, for example, go far beyond a, e, i, o and
u, and sometimes y. Those represent more than five or six sounds in
English (consider the a’s in father, fate and fat.) And vowels of
European languages vary more widely; think of the umlauted ones of
German, or the nasal ones of French, Portuguese and Polish.

Yet much more exotic vowels exist, for example that carry tones: pitch
that rises, falls, dips, stays low or high, and so on. Mandarin, the
biggest language in the Chinese family, has four tones, so that what
sounds just like “ma” in English has four distinct sounds, and
meanings. That is relatively simple compared with other Chinese
varieties. Cantonese has six tones, and Min Chinese dialects seven or
eight. One tone can also affect neighbouring tones’ pronunciation
through a series of complex rules.

Consonants are more complex. Some (p, t, k, m and n are common) appear
in most languages, but consonants can come in a blizzard of varieties
known as egressive (air coming from the nose or mouth), ingressive (air
coming back in the nose and mouth), ejective (air expelled from the
mouth while the breath is blocked by the glottis), pharyngealised (the
pharynx constricted), palatised (the tongue raised toward the palate)
and more. And languages with hard-to-pronounce consonants cluster in
families. Languages in East Asia tend to have tonal vowels, those of
the north-eastern Caucasus are known for consonantal complexity: Ubykh
has 78 consonant sounds. Austronesian languages, by contrast, may have
the simplest sounds of any language family.

Perhaps the most exotic sounds are clicks–technically “non-pulmonic”
consonants that do not use the airstream from the lungs for their
articulation. The best-known click languages are in southern Africa.
Xhosa, widely spoken in South Africa, is known for its clicks. The
first sound of the language’s name is similar to the click that
English-speakers use to urge on a horse.

Read the rest here.

Just rediscovered this Woody Allen classic, “The Moose.”

“Ya gotta be kiddin’ me. Paypah Towels”

Ali G and Pat Buchanan. “Izit eva werf…fightin’ a war…ova sanwiches?”

Just came across this article. Nothing extraordinary, but a good reminder.

Optimistic women ‘live longer’

Women who are optimistic have a lower risk of heart disease and death, an American study shows.

The latest study by US investigators mirrors the findings of earlier work by a Dutch team showing optimism reduces heart risk in men.

The research on nearly 100,000 women, published in the journal Circulation, found pessimists had higher blood pressure and cholesterol.

Even taking these risk factors into account, attitude alone altered risks.

When I mentioned to my parents that I was reading a book by Carl Sagan, they both immediately launched into their best “beel-yins and beel-yins of stars” impression.

“That guy?” they asked.

Yep, that guy. Sagan is remembered in the mainstream conciousness for pronouncing “billions” funny and for popularizing scientific thought about extra-terrestrials and the origins of the universe. He wrote Cosmos and Contact. A friend recently let me borrow The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, which is not actually a book written by Sagan, but more accurately a collection of a series of his lectures, edited later by his widow Ann Druyan.

I read the book faster than I’ve ever read any non-fiction. I thought about it when I wasn’t reading it. I read it instead of watching TV, instead of checking my e-mail, instead of showering. It is the best summary of the God-Science question that I have ever encountered. Sagan clearly and unpretentiously outlines the way that science has been able to shed light on answers to questions historically reserved for the realm of religion.

Some highlights:

p. 35 So the history of science—especially physics—has in part been the tension between the natural tendency to project our everyday experience on the universe and the universe’s noncompliance with this human tendency.

p. 64 But what clearly has been happening is that evolving before our eyes has been a God of the Gaps; that is, whatever it is we cannot explain lately is attributed to God. And then after a while, we explain it, and so that’s no longer God’s realm.

p.151 So, considering this range of alternatives, one thing that comes to my mind is how striking it is that when someone has a religious-conversion experience, it is almost always to the religion or one of the religions that are mainly believed in his or her community.

p.164 It is argued that some pain is necessary for a greater good. But why, exactly? If God is omnipotent, why can’t He arrange it so there is no pain? It seems to me a very telling point.

p.188 By no means does it follow that religions thereby have no function, or no benign function. They can provide in a very significant way, and without many mystical trappings, ethical standards for adults, stories for children, social organization for adolescents, ceremonials and rites of passage, history, literature, music, solace in time of bereavement, continuity with the past, and faith in the future. But there are many other things that they do not provide.

p.214 Because surely we are not faster than all other species, or better camouflaged, or better diggers or swimmers or fliers. We are only smarter. And, at least until the invention of weapons of mass destruction, this intelligence has led to the steady—in fact exponential—increase in our numbers.

p.216 What we need is a honing of the skills of explication, of dialogue, of what used to be called logic and rhetoric and what used to be essential to every college education, a honing of the skills of compassion, which, just like intellectual abilities, need practice to be perfected. If we are to understand another’s belief, then we must also understand the deficiencies and inadequacies of our own.

p. 224 The answer depends very much on what we mean by God. The word “god” is used to cover a vast multitude of mutually exclusive ideas…. Let me give a sense of two poles of the definition of God. One is the view of say, Spinoza or Einstein, which is more or less God as the sum total of the laws of physics. Now it would be foolish to deny that there are laws of physics. If that’s what we mean by God, then surely God exists…. But now take the opposite pole: the concept of God as an out-size male with a long white beard, sitting in a throne in the sky and tallying the fall of every sparrow. Now, for that kind of god I maintain there is no evidence. And while I’m open to suggestions of evidence for that kind of god, I personally am dubious that there will be powerful evidence for such a god not only in the near future but even in the distant future. And the two examples I’ve given you are hardly the full range of ideas that people mean when they use the word “god.”

Sagan’s greatest legacy may be that he was among the first to warn the public about environmental dangers and the threat of nuclear war. One of his last achievements was a campaign to unite religion and science in the battle against these problems.

According to new research presented last week at the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies in Seattle, adequate sleep may underpin our ability to understand complex emotions properly in waking life. “Sleep essentially is resetting the magnetic north of your emotional compass,” says Matthew Walker, director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at the University of California, Berkeley.

A recent study by Walker and his colleagues examined how rest — specifically, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep — influences our ability to read emotions in other people’s faces. In the small analysis of 36 adults, volunteers were asked to interpret the facial expressions of people in photographs, following either a 60- or 90-minute nap during the day or with no nap. Participants who had reached REM sleep (when dreaming most frequently occurs) during their nap were better able to identify expressions of positive emotions like happiness in other people, compared with participants who did not achieve REM sleep or did not nap at all. Those volunteers were more sensitive to negative expressions, including anger and fear.

Past research by Walker and colleagues at Harvard Medical School, which was published in the journal Current Biology, found that in people who were sleep deprived, activity in the prefrontal lobe — a region of the brain involved in controlling emotion — was significantly diminished. He suggests that a similar response may be occurring in the nap-deprived volunteers, albeit to a lesser extent, and that it may have its roots in evolution. “If you’re walking through the jungle and you’re tired, it might benefit you more to be hypersensitive to negative things,” he says. The idea is that with little mental energy to spare, you’re emotionally more attuned to things that are likely to be the most threatening in the immediate moment. Inversely, when you’re well rested, you may be more sensitive to positive emotions, which could benefit long-term survival, he suggests: “If it’s getting food, if it’s getting some kind of reward, finding a wife — those things are pretty good to pick up on.”

Full article here.

“Happy Birthday,” he said.  My birthday was two months earlier.  “I saw this in London and it seems like some of the stuff you’re into.” I wasn’t sure how to interpret that seeing as how the book was entitled Violence.

I had no idea who Žižek was, but I started getting pretty into the book. Reading Žižek is like getting really messed up on drugs and experiencing total chaos for a few hours before finally having a beautiful moment of clarity and then doing it all over again. Or maybe I’m just not well-read enough to really soak in his endless allusions.

Žižek is a Slovenian-born sociologist and psychoanalyst, and it didn’t take long for me to realize that he was also an atheist and a Marxist. (Though that’s not to say that he aligns himself with leftist political movements.) I wavered between adoring and loathing this book, and as I’ve learned more about Žižek, I’ve started to project the same ambivalence onto him. I greatly admire his analytical ability and his talent for analogy, but I could do without the extremism and the unchecked pretension and judgments. I like that he calls into question things that are normally automatically given the stamp of “goodness,” such as love, tolerance, political correctness, and human rights. But I’m annoyed that he never insinuates that, in the same breath, his opinions could and should also be called into question. I appreciate his desire to show that things are never as simple as the categories and labels that we create for them, but his aversion to these methods of organization make it seem like he rarely draws meaningful conclusions or offers solutions.

I love this, for example:

Habits are the very stuff our identities are made of. In them, we enact and thus define what we effectively are as social beings, often in contrast with our perception of what we are.

And this:

[If] a jewel is stolen from a locked container, the solution is not telekinesis but the use of a strong magnet or some other sleight of hand; if a person vanishes unexpectedly, there must be a secret tunnel. Naturalistic explanations are more magic than a resort to supernatural intervention.

But sentences like this made me want to throw the book across the room:

The standard Marxist hermeneutics of unearthing the particular bias of abstract universality should thus be supplemented by its opposite: by the properly Hegelian procedure which uncovers the universality of what presents itself as a particular position.

Although I’m probably just angry because I have know idea what he’s talking about.

Here, Žižek describes his “spontaneous attitude towards the universe” and concludes that love is evil:

Then, he describes true love as seeing “perfection as imperfection itself”:

Žižek on ABC explaining why the world’s toilets show ideology and why being a philosopher means living with a “personal trauma”:

Žižek on vegetarians

Top 10 Tools for a Free Online Education

10. Teach yourself programming

9. Get a personal MBA

8. Learn to actually use Ubuntu

7. Get started on a new language

6. Trade your skills, find an instructor

5. Academic Earth and YouTubeEDU

4. Teach yourself all kinds of photography

3. Get an unofficial liberal arts major

2. Learn an instrument

1. Learn from an actual college course online

Thanks to Adam for the heads-up.