5 Languages That Could Change the Way You See the World I went to my neighbor’s house for something to eat yesterday. Think about this sentence. It’s pretty simple—English speakers would know precisely what it means. The way that different languages convey information has fascinated linguists, anthropologists, and psychologists for decades. This argument was later discredited, as researchers concluded that it overstated language’s constraints on our minds. These five languages reveal how information can be expressed in extremely different ways, and how these habits of thinking can affect us. A Language Where You’re Not the Center of the World English speakers and others are highly egocentric when it comes to orienting themselves in the world. Linguist Guy Deustcher says that Guugu Ymithirr speakers have a kind of “internal compass” that is imprinted from an extremely young age. A Language Where Time Flows East to West For the Kuuk Thaayorre speakers, the passage of time was intimately tied to the cardinal directions. Not so in Yélî Dnye.
Cabinet de Curiosités Ahhh Maison&Objet ! J’adore m’y rendre au moins une fois par an. Découvrir de nouvelles marques, faire de nouvelles rencontres : c’est toujours top ! Pour cette cession de janvier 2015 donc, retour en images sur mes petits coups de coeur. Chez &Klevering, beaucoup de jolies choses notamment du côté de la tendance tropicale. Chez Miss Print, on craque pour ces imprimés colorés. Immense coup de coeur pour la stand Objet de Curiosité. Côté vaisselle, ces belles couleurs sont chez Rina Menardi. Une de mes découvertes de cette année, la maison TANE. Ici, une ambiance cosy et chic signée D’argentat… Les lampadaires sont juste canons ! Dans un style beaucoup plus moderne, j’ai trouvé très chouettes les suspensions et les systèmes de rangements de chez Iris Hantverk. Encore de la vaisselle colorée : c’est chez Ekobo cette fois. Du design végétal dans un esprit très japonisant, c’est chez Aquaphyte. Pour les couleurs et les textures, Arcade Paris. Crédit photo : Céline Alata pour FrenchyFancy
Is Beirut the codeswitching capital of the world? At this high-end organic farmer’s market in downtown Beirut, buyers and sellers speak a mishmash of languages, usually Arabic and English or French. Just trying to pay for juice I have to switch back and forth from English to Arabic. The stand clerk starts in Arabic, “Here you go,” before switching in English, “these two [juices]?” Pia Bou Khater is at the market with me. Codeswitching this way is one of the characteristics that defines life in Beirut for visitors and for many Lebanese. “When I'm interacting with people, like buying things or trying to bargain, I rarely switch,” Pia explains. Multilingualism the way Pia knows it isn’t uncommon in Beirut. But that’s not the only reason she used “merci.” But another linguist, Lina Choueri, says the regular mixing of the three languages in everyday life actually didn’t happen until much later. Choueri’s dad’s generation just communicated in Arabic. Back at the market Pia agrees with Choueri’s dad.
Uchronia: The Alternate History List Why Do Most Languages Have So Few Words for Smells? Describe a banana. It's yellow, perhaps with some green edges. When peeled, it has a smooth, soft, mushy texture. It tastes sweet, maybe a little creamy. And it smells like... well, it smells like a banana. Every sense has its own “lexical field,” a vast palette of dedicated descriptive words for colors, sounds, tastes, and textures. All of our other scent descriptors are really descriptions of sources: We say that things smell like cinnamon, or roses, or teen spirit, or napalm in the morning. Some scientists have taken this as evidence that humans have relegated smell to the sensory sidelines, while vision has taken center-field. But not all of us. “These terms are really very salient to them,” she says. For example, ltpit describes the smell of a binturong or bearcat—a two-meter-long animal that looks like a shaggy, black-furred otter, and that famously smells of popcorn. These terms don't refer to general qualities that are the dominion of other senses, like edibility.
Living with the Tibetan Mastiffs - the 200lbs 'bear dogs' HUGE dogs with coats that make them look like bears are being produced at a kennel which claims to offer the “dog of your dreams”. Aleksandr and Nina Khilyk run Kinu Liutas Kennels, a Ukraine-based business that’s home to some of the most unusual looking dogs in the world. The couple specialise in the Tibetan Mastiff – an ancient breed notable for their large frames and extremely hairy coats. Nina told Barcroft Studios: “The Tibetan Mastiff is one of the most ancient breeds in the world. They're flawless guards, excellent friends and companions. Why is English so weirdly different from other langu... English speakers know that their language is odd. So do people saddled with learning it non-natively. The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. Spelling is a matter of writing, of course, whereas language is fundamentally about speaking. There is no other language, for example, that is close enough to English that we can get about half of what people are saying without training and the rest with only modest effort. We think it’s a nuisance that so many European languages assign gender to nouns for no reason, with French having female moons and male boats and such. More weirdness? Why is our language so eccentric? Sign up for Aeon’s Newsletter English started out as, essentially, a kind of German. The first thing that got us from there to here was the fact that, when the Angles, Saxons and Jutes (and also Frisians) brought their language to England, the island was already inhabited by people who spoke very different tongues.
13 more things that dont make sense Cookies on the New Scientist website close Our website uses cookies, which are small text files that are widely used in order to make websites work more effectively. To continue using our website and consent to the use of cookies, click away from this box or click 'Close' Find out about our cookies and how to change them Log in Your login is case sensitive I have forgotten my password close My New Scientist Look for Science Jobs 13 more things that don't make sense (Image: Loungepark / The Image Bank / Getty) Strive as we might to make sense of the world, there are mysteries that still confound us. Axis of evil Radiation left from the big bang is still glowing in the sky – in a mysterious and controversial pattern Dark flow Something unseeable and far bigger than anything in the known universe is hauling a group of galaxies towards it at inexplicable speed Eocene hothouse Tens of millions of years ago, the average temperature at the poles was 15 or 20 °C. Fly-by anomalies Hybrid life Morgellons disease
5 Great Infographics for Language Teachers and Learners Infographics are great learning materials. The colourful graphics, clear text and their size make them ideal for classroom integration. I have been posting some of the ones I deem educationl to help teachers leverage this resource to create engaging, relevant and personalized learning experiences in their classes. Due to their size we could not embed all the infographics in one post instead we distributed them on four posts with each one of them containing links to other posts to make it easy for you to navigate the four posts without having to move away. Teachers can print them out and pin them on the class wall for students to access throughout the whole year. Part One ( scroll down to read the content of this part) Definite and indefinite articlesAll about AdjectivesPunctuation Passive VoiceWhen to use e.g and i.e Part 2 : ( Click Here to access this part ) Part 3 : ( Click Here to access this part ) Part 4 : ( Click Here to access this part ) Part One 1- Definite and indefinte article
Gary Sullivan's Ten Years in a Quandary and How Flarf Grew To this day, wherever I meet Poetry readers they want to talk to me about flarf and what I think about it. Amazing. Well, Gary Sullivan - who coined the term... and who contributed to our infamous portfolio of flarf and conceptual poetry - wrote in with some meditations on its tenth birthday. “It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.”—Robert Benchley Today, May 21, 2011, as true-believers all over the world await their final evacuation from Earth in advance of the Great Tribulation, I’m spending the morning sucking down a second cup of Bustelo and scrolling through some old e-mail archives. Why am I futzing through this electronic effluvia when, clearly, I ought to be repenting? The first post, my own, was a play in five acts, “Angry at God,” the entire dialog of which was cobbled together from Google results of searches on “Awww” (with varying numbers of Ws) “yeah” and “God.” … and so on.
The World's Most Spoken Languages And Where They Are Spoken This beautifully illustrated infographic (above), designed by South China Morning Post’s graphics director Alberto Lucas Lopéz, shows the most spoken known languages in the world and where they’re spoken by the 6.3 billion people included in the study. Based on records collated from the database Ethnologue, the infographic illustrates the wide-ranging facts and figures of the world’s living languages catalogued since 1951. “There are at least 7,102 known languages alive in the world today. Twenty-three of these languages are a mother tongue for more than 50 million people. “We represent each language within black borders and then provide the numbers of native speakers (in millions) by country. You can see the full pie chart in all its technicolor glory here. [H/T: ZME Science] Read this next: Blood Donors In Sweden Get A Text Whenever They Save A Life
TechCrunch fait désormais partie de Verizon Media Many investors — including me — spend most of our day doing the same things people have always done in our job: in my case, due diligence, deal execution, etc. However, being a “microinfluencer” is now part of the job description. In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 followers. The challenge is that my time and money budget for “influencing”–content creation and marketing– is minimal.