Language enables people to express their feelings, ideas, wishes and so on. It is a tool of knowledge through which the worldly knowledge is acquired and preserved, and language is one of the indicators of cultural identity of a linguistic community as well as individual personality. Each language contains its own people’s culture and customs. (Link)

Languages, at least in their literary form, are artificially transformed. They, of course, contain some soft of people’s culture and customs, but often in perverted form, when local dialect of uncreative minority was taken as a basis. In that case, when territorial dominates over creative from the very beginning, a language could be a bad tool. This primitive language will conserve the pettiness of it’s native speakers, and as so it will not allow any this-language-speaking potential genius to develop his talent. Should not we save people from their languages?

366:8 The Meeting | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

CYRIL. Well, before you read it to me, I should like to ask you a question. What do you mean by saying that life, ‘poor, probable,uninteresting human life,’ will try to reproduce the marvels of art? I can quite understand your objection to art being treated as a mirror. You think it would reduce genius to the position of a cracked looking – glass. But you don’t mean to say that you seriously believe that Life imitates Art, that Life in fact is the mirror, and Art the reality?
VIVIAN. Certainly I do. Paradox though it may seem – and paradoxes are always dangerous things – it is none the less true that Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life….
All that I desire to point out is the general principle that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life, and I feel sure that if you think seriously about it you will find that it is true. Life holds the mirror up to Art, and either reproduces some strange type imagined by painter or sculptor, or realises in fact what has been dreamed in fiction…

(Oscar Wilde, The Decay Of Lying: An Observation)

Cadaqués | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Cadaqués | Flickr – Photo Sharing!

Photo: mireia.

Cadaqués

1912 Tea Party by rustymitchell

Rusty Mitchell on deviantART: a photo from my family album no lie.

Quotes:

…the constant flux of time makes everything seem unreal, the past is no longer, the future is not yet and the present disappears (General Psycho-pathology)

Time makes everything more interesting, including you… (Television and radio,
Giraud Chester, Garnet R. Garrison, Edgar E. Willis)

Testing my brand new lens, Canon EFS 10-22 mm (Wiiiiiiiide angle, pretty coool). In this take i was no longer than 1 meter from her, and she seems to be so far away!. (Antonio Blay)

We Should Rest On Sundays... by Antonio Blay

More people are running barefoot these days, according to The Los Angeles Times.

Some athletes train and compete shoeless, like South African runner Zola Budd, a former Olympic track and field competitor.

So why do they do it?

Now there’s a scientific answer. Scientists have found that those who run barefoot, or in minimal footwear, tend to avoid hurtful and potentially damaging impacts, equivalent to two to three times body weight, that shod heel-strikers repeatedly experience.

“By landing on the middle or front of the foot, barefoot runners have almost no impact collision, much less than most shod runners generate when they heel-strike. Most people today think barefoot running is dangerous and hurts, but actually you can run barefoot on the world’s hardest surfaces without the slightest discomfort and pain. All you need is a few calluses to avoid roughing up the skin of the foot. Further, it might be less injurious than the way some people run in shoes,”

says Daniel E. Lieberman, professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University.

The differences between shod and unshod running have evolutionary underpinnings. Homo sapiens, in contrast to our early Australopith ancestors, “has evolved a strong, large arch that we use as a spring when running”. Authors of a paper appearing this week in the journal Nature write:

“Humans have engaged in endurance running for millions of years, but the modern running shoe was not invented until the 1970s. For most of human evolutionary history, runners were either barefoot or wore minimal footwear such as sandals or moccasins with smaller heels and little cushioning.”

It is an impressive investigation though. But I wonder why it took so long to discover that humans didn’t evolve wearing running shoes?

Technorati Tags: Zola, Budd, Olympic, scientist, Daniel, Lieberman, Harvard, Homo, Australopith, Nature, human, barefoot, people, footwear, shod, heel, foot, runner, shoes, human, evolutionary

According to the new study, human languages may adapt more like biological organisms, namely the more common and popular the language, the simpler its construction to facilitate its survival.

For years, it has been the reigning assumption in the linguistic sciences that languages develop is based upon random change and historical drift. But a large-scale statistical analysis of more than 2,000 of the world’s languages provides an evidence that there is a striking relationships between the demographic properties of a language – such as its population and global spread – and the grammatical complexity of those languages. Languages having the most speakers were found to have far simpler grammars, specifically morphology, than languages spoken by few people and in circumscribed regions.

Larger populations tend to have simpler pronoun and number systems and a smaller number of cases and genders and in general do not employ complex prefixing or suffixing rules in their grammars. A consequence is that languages with long histories of adult learners have become easier to learn over time.

The authors of the study insist that their results draw connections between the evolution of human language and biological organisms.

The conclusion is the following:

A consequence is that languages with long histories of adult learners have become easier to learn over time.

The full article may be found here.

It looked convincing enough for me, as a non-specialist in linguistic studies. But then I turned to the List of languages by number of native speakers From Wikipedia. The largest number of native speakers has Mandarin Chinese (estimated as 800,000,000). I don’t think that it is the easiest language to learn (not only for Europeans). Mandarin Chinese is followed by Spanish (358,000,000 speakers) and English (350,000,000) in number of speakers, comparatively simple languages. But then we have Hindi/Urdu (200,000,000), Arabic (150,000,000), Bengali (170,000,000), Russian (160,000,000)… I think the studies like that can prove only one thing: Anglocentrism of the researchers.

Heraclitus, quoted by Bertrand Russell (in “History of Western Philosophy”), was very serious saying that

“It is hard to fight with one’s heart’s desire. Whatever it wishes to get, it purchases at the cost of soul. … It is not good for men to get all that they wish to get.”

George Bernard Shaw (in “Man and Superman” (1903), act 4) responded that

There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it.

P.S. Visit Pino Daeni’s Art Collections (see also Progressive Art Media – Pino Page, Pino – Pino Daeni. LiveInternet)

I would call Caspar David Friedrich one of my favourite painters. And his ‘Moonrise over the Sea‘ is one of my favorite paintings, maybe the most loved one. It depicts a small group of people on the coast of cold northern sea late in the evening. You can imagine that these women and a man are close relatives or friends spending their free time together. It is too dark to read, to late to speak. They left their home and made their way towards the sea. They made themselves comfortable on a boulder and watched the sea, the moon over the sea, sailing ships. Quiet picture of non-existent epoch and old-fashioned way of spending time.

Links

1. Caspar David Friedrich – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2. Category:Oil paintings by Caspar David Friedrich – Wikimedia Commons

3. File:Caspar David Friedrich 031.jpg – Wikimedia Commons

4. NGA – Caspar David Friedrich, Moonrise over the Sea, 1822

5. NGA – Spirit of an Age: Introduction

6. Friedrich, Caspar David: Mondaufgang am Meer [2] – Zeno.org