Seeing languages differently. In a guest blog for the BoingBoing.net website, Dr. Michael Shaughnessy, a German professor at Washington & Jefferson College who specializes in computer-assisted language learning and visual representations of culture, looks at
color and
space— two aspects of the visual world whose impact on language varies between languages and cultures. “(There is) a direct connection between the language one speaks and the functionality of the visual cortex and the brain,” he observes. “In other words, the vocabulary you use and how you categorize the world affects the speed at which your brain can recall certain information through your optic nerves.”
Dr. Shaughnessy says that in addition to color, spatial perception varies among cultures according to researchers. He explains: “These differences in how we perceive space (eg. size, distance, depth, and direction, etc) lead to corresponding linguistic differences manifested in the words we use to describe our surroundings in different language. This lens of language here affects how we perceive and feel about our surroundings.”
Read Mike Shaughnessy’s “Seeing Languages Differently” in BoingBoing.net now! After a stroke, a poet hunts for the language lost. In a moving feature story in the June 25, 2010 issue of
The New York Times, Jim Dwyer recounts the ordeal of Marie Ponsot, a poet who had lost huge chunks of her memory due to a stroke. “Her brain had been ransacked,” Dwyer writes. “Poems that she had been reciting from memory for the better part of a century had disappeared. She cross-examined herself: What, she asked, have I lost?”
Marie Ponsot couldn’t answer that question. “You can’t say what you don’t know,” Ms. Ponsot, 89, said. “So I thought, let me go back to the earliest thing I ever knew by heart.” Later, she remembered that the Spanish mystic Teresa of Avila had written a meditation on the prayer. Relates Dwyer: “An image came to her of a page from the Roman missal; she could, she said, see the page’s border, but not the words. Then it arrived whole, in Latin:
Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum. She tried to translate the Latin to English, to reverse-engineer her memory, like a computer hacking itself. ‘It was getting sticky, until all of a sudden it popped into my head,’ she said. ‘In English.’”
Read Jim Dwyer’s “After Stroke, a Poet Hunts for the Language Lost” in The New York Times now!Language police: a failure I’d love to watch. In her language column in the June 27, 2010 issue of the
Boston Globe, lexicographer Erin McKean thinks that The Queen’s English Society, self-appointed defenders of proper speech and writing since 1972, might have hit the right idea with its plans to set up an Academy of English—one modeled after the Académie Française, which for nearly 400 years had rigorously policed which words are allowed into official French.
But she quickly qualifies her approval of the idea: “Not because English needs a standards body—or could ever possibly obey one—but because I think that, by showing just how ludicrous and unworkable a standards-setting body would be, we can get people to think more kindly of English as it is, and stop lamenting that everyone else’s language isn’t up to snuff.”
Read Erin McKean’s “Language police: A failure I’d love to watch” in the Boston Globe now!
