Claire McGregor
I poke brains.
Oberlin College Mail - Compose Mail - Untitled Document. Masculine, feminine or human? Posted on SleptOn.com, June 2, 2008. by Robert Jensen In a guest lecture about masculinity to a college class, I ask the students to generate two lists that might help clarify the concept. For the first, I tell them to imagine themselves as parents whose 12-year-old son asks, “Mommy/daddy, what does is mean to be a man?” The list I write on the board as they respond is not hard to predict: To be a man is to be strong, responsible, loving. When that list is complete, I ask the women to observe while the men answer a second question: When you are in all-male spaces, such as the locker room or a night out with the guys, what do you say to each other about what it means to be a man?
The students, both men and women, laugh nervously, knowing the second list will be different from the first. When that process is over, I step back and ask the class to consider the meaning of the two lists. Emergency and Disaster Information Service. Chomsky was wrong: evolutionary analysis shows languages obey few rules. Human languages are far more complex than any animal communication system we're aware of, and yet young children can easily learn to master more than one language in an astonishingly short period of time.
This has led a number of linguists, most notably Noam Chomsky, to suggest that there might be language universals, common features of all languages that the human brain is attuned to, making learning easier; others have looked for statistical correlations between languages. Now, a team of cognitive scientists has teamed up with an evolutionary biologist to perform a phylogenetic analysis of language families, and the results suggest that when it comes to the way languages order key sentence components, there are no rules. The authors of the new paper point out just how hard it is to study languages.
We're aware of over 7,000 of them, and they vary significantly in complexity. Linguists, however, have been attempting to find order within the chaos. 20 Awesomely Untranslatable Words from Around the World. WASH by AULOMA.