In two short essays – written in 1933 – Walter Benjamin argues that primitive language emerged in magical correspondence with the world. The faculty we all exhibit in childhood play, to impersonate and imitate people and things loses its determining power as language gradually takes over from our “non-sensuous” connection with reality. In a break from Saussurian linguistics, Benjamin decries the loss of this “mimetic faculty”, as it becomes further replaced by the “archive of non-sensuous correspondences” we know as writing.

To put it in simpler terms… Where once we read the world, the stars or the entrails of a… ]]> Wed, 25 May 2011 05:21:34 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/the-doctrine-of-the-similar-gif-gif-gif http://www.geekologie.com/2011/05/wonderful-robots-develop-own-language.php Researchers at The University of Queensland and Queensland University of Technology have taught robots how to develop their own language. That way, when they're about to deal the finishing blow to an injured human, they can ask if you want the laser beam in your beep boop or grabble grabble. Options, wonderful. The robot language was developed by a group of 'Lingodroids' wandering around an office making up words for places. God, it's called 'by the water cooler' you f***ing idiots! ]]> Thu, 19 May 2011 02:11:00 -0700 http://www.geekologie.com/2011/05/wonderful-robots-develop-own-language.php http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-son3EJTrU&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Fri, 11 Mar 2011 10:35:42 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-son3EJTrU&feature=youtube_gdata http://explainer.net/2011/01/george-lakoff/ As part of our research on explanatory journalism, we’re interviewing experts in fields outside journalism about their approaches to explaining complex systems to non-specialtists.

Our first expert is cognitive linguist George Lakoff, who did groundbreaking research on the embodiment of thought and language and the way people think using metaphors. For Lakoff, language is not a neutral system of communication, because it is always based on frames, conceptual metaphors, narratives, and emotions. Political thought and language is inherently moral and emotional. The basic phrases journalists use every day—words like “liberty” “freedom” “immigrant” “taxes”— are essentially contested concepts that have radically… ]]> Fri, 04 Feb 2011 03:26:37 -0700 http://explainer.net/2011/01/george-lakoff/ http://www.tnr.com/blog/john-mcwhorter/77631/dont-believe-the-hype-about-aborigines-yiddish-or-ebonics Judging from how the Times magazine’s excerpt from Guy Deutscher’s new book has been one of the most read pieces in the paper for over a week now, the book is on its way to libating readers ever eager for the seductive idea that people’s languages channel the way they think--that is, that grammar creates cultural outlooks.

“Oooh-mmmm!” I heard in a room once when a linguist parenthetically suggested that the reason speakers of one Native American language have prefixes instead of words to indicate mixing, poking, and sucking on food is because they are “culturally” attuned… ]]> Thu, 23 Sep 2010 05:05:00 -0700 http://www.tnr.com/blog/john-mcwhorter/77631/dont-believe-the-hype-about-aborigines-yiddish-or-ebonics http://ask.metafilter.com/10490/What-concepts-do-not-exist-in-the-English-language Carl Honoré (In Praise of Slow) says Canada's Baffin Island Inuit "use the same word—'uvatiarru'—to mean both 'in the distant past' and 'in the distant future.' Time, in such cultures, is always coming as well as going."

In an essay by Louise Edrich (Two Languages in Mind, but Just One in the Heart), she writes about learning Ojibwemownin and how "nouns are mainly desginated as alive or dead, animate or inanimate...once I began to think of stones as animate, I started to wonder whether I was picking up a stone or it was putting iteslf in my… ]]> Fri, 10 Sep 2010 04:17:00 -0700 http://ask.metafilter.com/10490/What-concepts-do-not-exist-in-the-English-language http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr11PhgyOOk&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Tue, 15 Jun 2010 14:35:00 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr11PhgyOOk&feature=youtube_gdata http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jun/13/my-bright-idea-guy-deutscher Guy Deutscher is that rare beast, an academic who talks good sense about linguistics, his chosen field. In his new book, Through the Language Glass (Heinemann), he fearlessly contradicts the fashionable consensus, espoused by the likes of Steven Pinker, that language is wholly a product of nature, that it does not take colour and value from culture and society. Deutscher argues, in a playful and provocative way, that our mother tongue does indeed affect how we think and, just as important, how we perceive the world.

An honorary research fellow at the University of Manchester, the 40-year-old… ]]> Sun, 13 Jun 2010 05:33:00 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jun/13/my-bright-idea-guy-deutscher http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/146805 Sacrifice, speech, writing and art: I am interested in the different ways in which a sacrifice, a sacrament, a spoken word and a written word act as signifiers. The notion for instance that the sacrament, at the point of its acceptance, is understood as becoming the signified. What can you tell me / what has been written about the notions of sacrifice and their relationship to speech, art and the technologies of writing? I am at the very early stages of writing on these themes (so forgive any gross generalisations I make here).

I have a sort of… ]]> Wed, 24 Feb 2010 06:28:14 -0700 http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/146805 http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_colapinto In the wake of the controversy that greeted his paper, Everett encouraged scholars to come to the Amazon and observe the Pirahã for themselves. The first person to take him up on the offer was a forty-three-year-old American evolutionary biologist named Tecumseh Fitch, who in 2002 co-authored an important paper with Chomsky and Marc Hauser, an evolutionary psychologist and biologist at Harvard, on recursion. Fitch and his cousin Bill, a sommelier based in Paris, were due to arrive by floatplane in the Pirahã village a couple of hours after Everett and I did. As the plane landed on the water,… ]]> Sun, 21 Feb 2010 17:00:00 -0700 http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_colapinto http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/144810 De-constructing 'code': I am looking for philosophical (from W. Benjamin through to post-structuralism and beyond) examinations of 'code'. That both includes the assumptions contained in the word 'code' and any actual objects or subjects that code is connected to - including, but not limited to: computer programming, cyphers, linguistics, genetics etc. I am looking to question the assumptions of 'code'. Perhaps a specific example of a theorist de-constructing the term.

I am currently knee deep in an examination of certain practices and assumptions that have arisen from digital media/medium and digital practice (art and making in the era of… ]]> Tue, 02 Feb 2010 07:35:00 -0700 http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/144810 http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/opinions/a_common_nomenclature_for_lego_families.php Every family, it seems, has its own set of words for describing particular Lego pieces. No one uses the official names. “Dad, please could you pass me that Brick 2x2?” No. In our house, it’ll always be: “Dad, please could you pass me that four-er?” And I’ll pass it, because I know exactly which piece he means. Lego nomenclature is essential for family Lego building. “Dad, I’m building a roof for the medical pod, but I need a hinge-y bit to make it open up. You know, one of those four-er flat hinge-y bits.” ]]> Sun, 08 Nov 2009 04:01:00 -0700 http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/opinions/a_common_nomenclature_for_lego_families.php http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/2009%20-%20Fall/full-McWhorter-Fall-2009.html In depicting the emergence of the world’s languages as a curse of gibberish, the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel makes us moderns smile. Yet, considering the headache that 6,000 languages can induce in real life, the story makes a certain sense. Not long ago, 33 of the FBI’s 12,000 employees spoke Arabic, as did 6 of the 1,000 employees at the American Embassy in Iraq. How can we significantly improve that situation is a good question. It’s hard to learn Arabic, and not only because it’s hard to pick up any new language. Iraqi Arabic is actually one… ]]> Sun, 01 Nov 2009 04:32:00 -0700 http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/2009%20-%20Fall/full-McWhorter-Fall-2009.html http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/09/27/thinking_literally/?page=full Drawing on philosophy and linguistics, cognitive scientists have begun to see the basic metaphors that we use all the time not just as turns of phrase, but as keys to the structure of thought. By taking these everyday metaphors as literally as possible, psychologists are upending traditional ideas of how we learn, reason, and make sense of the world around us. The result has been a torrent of research testing the links between metaphors and their physical roots, with many of the papers reading as if they were commissioned by Amelia Bedelia, the implacably literal-minded children’s book hero. Researchers have… ]]> Mon, 28 Sep 2009 08:59:00 -0700 http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/09/27/thinking_literally/?page=full http://www.wbenjamin.org/mimesis.html Art is imitation only to the extent to which it is objective expression, far removed from psychology. There may have been a time long ago when this expressive quality of the objective world generally was perceived by the human sensory apparatus. It no longer is. Expression nowadays lives on only in art. Through expression art can keep at a distance the moment of being-for-other which is always threatening to engulf it. Art is thus able to speak in itself. This is the realization through mimesis. Art's expression is the antithesis of 'expressing something.' Mimesis is the ideal of art, not… ]]> Mon, 13 Jul 2009 07:19:00 -0700 http://www.wbenjamin.org/mimesis.html http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2009/02/26/362-greek-to-me-mapping-mutual-incomprehension/ “When an English speaker doesn’t understand a word of what someone says, he or she states that it’s ‘Greek to me’. When a Hebrew speaker encounters this difficulty, it ’sounds like Chinese’. I’ve been told the Korean equivalent is ’sounds like Hebrew’,” says Yuval Pinter (here on the excellent Languagelog). Which begs the question: “Has there been a study of this phrase phenomenon, relating different languages on some kind of Directed Graph?” Well apparently there has, even if only perfunctorily, and the result is this cartogram. ]]> Sun, 07 Jun 2009 03:42:00 -0700 http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2009/02/26/362-greek-to-me-mapping-mutual-incomprehension/ http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2008/12/in_another_city_another_me_is_writing.html Take this article, for example. It is an unwinding spring of phonic sounds, encoded into a series of arbitrary symbols, stretching from left to right within an imaginary frame projected onto the surface of your computer screen. Here lies the perfect example of an artefact with intention behind it. A series of artefacts in fact, positioned by my mind and placed within a certain context (i.e. 3QD: a fascinating and widely read blog). As a collection, as an article, its intention is easy to distinguish. I wanted to say something, so I wrote an article, which I hoped would be… ]]> Mon, 29 Dec 2008 11:52:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2008/12/in_another_city_another_me_is_writing.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collocation Within the area of corpus linguistics, collocation is defined as a sequence of words or terms which co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. Collocation refers to the restrictions on how words can be used together, for example which prepos ]]> Tue, 25 Mar 2008 16:08:00 -0700 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collocation