Ajit Narayanan: A word game to communicate in any language | Talk Video. How Language Seems To Shape One's View Of The World : Shots - Health News. "It's on the left," he says. "No, it's southeast of here," she says. iStockphoto hide caption itoggle caption iStockphoto "It's on the left," he says. "No, it's southeast of here," she says. iStockphoto Lera Boroditsky once did a simple experiment: She asked people to close their eyes and point southeast. She says the difference lies in language. If you want to learn another language and become fluent, you may have to change the way you behave in small but sometimes significant ways, specifically how you sort things into categories and what you notice. Researchers are starting to study how those changes happen, says Aneta Pavlenko, a professor of applied linguistics at Temple University. If people speaking different languages need to group or observe things differently, then bilinguals ought to switch focus depending on the language they use.
Based on her research, she started teaching future language teachers how to help their English-speaking students group things in Russian. Angst In Germany Over Invasion Of American English : Parallels. iStockphoto It seems hardly a sentence is spoken in Berlin that doesn't have an American English word in it. One word that especially grates — and I confess to a certain bias, having learned German as a toddler when it wasn't so Americanized — is a word pronounced "sogh-ee. " Or, as Americans say it, "sorry. " "Sogh-ee" your package is late. "Sogh-ee" your hot water is off. "Sogh-ee" we can't help you. Baby — to refer to an infant Campen — to camp Computer Cool Downloaden — as to download on a computer Party — as in a festivity Seifenoper — literally translated means soap opera Sexy Team — as in a sports team Teenager Wellness — to refer to a spa Anatol Stefanowitsch, an English linguistics professor at the Free University of Berlin, says it makes sense that many German businesses have adopted that word.
"I mean, 'sorry' is quite a useful way of apologizing because it doesn't commit you to very much. "Sorry" is one of more than 10,000 American words Germans have borrowed since 1990. What Is The Funniest Joke In The World? : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture. iStockphoto What's brown and sticky? A stick. I actually laugh every time I hear this joke. That, no doubt, tells you something about me. It doesn't take a lot to make me laugh. People laugh at different jokes. Texan: "Where are you from? " Whereas Europeans, it is claimed, go for the absurd or surreal: A German Shepherd went to the telegram office, took out a blank form, and wrote: "Woof. Some jokes, it would appear, are funnier than other jokes.
This is exactly the question that Wiseman set himself. I'm a philosopher. It's pretty clear that whatever Wiseman came up with, it isn't gonna be the funniest joke in the world. Weems makes the argument that jokes have deep sources in our human needs and psychologies. I know what you're thinking though. Are you ready? Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. No comment. So, dear readers, here's an invitation: Which jokes do you think are funniest?
Translation as a Performing Art. Deb Roy: The birth of a word. Words, words, words | TED Playlists. Patricia Kuhl: The linguistic genius of babies.