Language: structure July 31, 2010
Posted by t-maker in Miscellaneous.Tags: dialect, language, literary, primitive
1 comment so far
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?
running barefoot February 2, 2010
Posted by t-maker in Miscellaneous, Science.Tags: Australopith, barefoot, Budd, Daniel, evolutionary, foot, footwear, Harvard, heel, Homo, human, Lieberman, Nature, Olympic, people, runner, scientist, shod, shoes, Zola
add a comment
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.
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
linguistic evolution January 29, 2010
Posted by t-maker in History, Miscellaneous, Science.Tags: biological, History, human, language, linguistic, Science, study
add a comment
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.
fragments 