Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Monday, June 9, 2025
Sunday, November 10, 2024
Monday, May 20, 2024
Wednesday, May 24, 2023
10 Emotions You've Felt But Had No Name For
John Koenig is the marvelous author of THE DICTIONARY OF OBSCURE SORROWS, a book of neologisms to express new terms for subtle emotions. His made up words are combinations of word roots from languages all around the world. While the words themselves might sound clinical, their definitions are lyrical and touching. I have felt a few of these and am happy to know others have too...and that we finally have names for them, thanks to Koenig's imagination!
1. Chrysalism
[kris-a-lizim] The feeling of tranquility when you’re indoors when it’s raining heavily outside.
2. Lilo
[ly-lo] The friendship between two people who feel as if no time has passed when they see each other after a long period of separation.
3. Sonder
[son-der] The realization that every stranger and passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own. That each person is occupied by their own personal ambitions, worries, and problems.
4. Monachopsis
[mo-na-kop-sis] The inability to adapt to your surroundings and the feeling of being out of place.
5. Eramnesia
[eram-nee-ja] The realization that you were born in the wrong time period, wishing you lived in another time.
6. Anemoia
[an-em-oh-ya] The feeling of nostalgia for a time or place that you have never experienced.
7. Pâro
[pah-ro] The feeling that no matter what you do, you’re doing it wrong.
8. Xeno
[zee-noh] The powerful moments shared between random strangers, such as a smile or a laugh, which reduce feelings of loneliness.
9. Acatalepsy
[aka-ta-lep-sy] The apparent impossibility of humans ever comprehending the universe.
10. Liberosis
[lib-ero-sis] The desire to care less about things, to feel less.
https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/
And you can buy the book here on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Obscure-Sorrows-John-Koenig-ebook/dp/B08VJMFFRB?ref_=ast_author_mpb
1. Chrysalism
[kris-a-lizim] The feeling of tranquility when you’re indoors when it’s raining heavily outside.
2. Lilo
[ly-lo] The friendship between two people who feel as if no time has passed when they see each other after a long period of separation.
3. Sonder
[son-der] The realization that every stranger and passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own. That each person is occupied by their own personal ambitions, worries, and problems.
4. Monachopsis
[mo-na-kop-sis] The inability to adapt to your surroundings and the feeling of being out of place.
5. Eramnesia
[eram-nee-ja] The realization that you were born in the wrong time period, wishing you lived in another time.
6. Anemoia
[an-em-oh-ya] The feeling of nostalgia for a time or place that you have never experienced.
7. Pâro
[pah-ro] The feeling that no matter what you do, you’re doing it wrong.
8. Xeno
[zee-noh] The powerful moments shared between random strangers, such as a smile or a laugh, which reduce feelings of loneliness.
9. Acatalepsy
[aka-ta-lep-sy] The apparent impossibility of humans ever comprehending the universe.
10. Liberosis
[lib-ero-sis] The desire to care less about things, to feel less.
https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/
And you can buy the book here on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Obscure-Sorrows-John-Koenig-ebook/dp/B08VJMFFRB?ref_=ast_author_mpb
Sunday, January 8, 2023
"The weird way language affects our sense of time and space"
I've been meaning to post this amazing article from BBC Future for many weeks now, and finally, here it is, full of incredible, mind boggling insights about language and communication and psychology and how differently we perceive our movement through time, and thus the structure of the universe altogether.
The weird way language affects our sense of time and space
By Miriam Frankel and Matt Warren*
3rd November 2022
The languages we speak can have a surprising impact on the way we think about the world and even how we move through it.
If you were asked to walk diagonally across a field, would you know what to do? Or what if you were offered £20 ($23) today or double that amount in a month, would you be willing to wait? And how would you line up 10 photos of your parents if you were instructed to sort them in chronological order? Would you place them horizontally or vertically? In which direction would the timeline move?
These might seem like simple questions, but remarkably, your answers to these questions are likely to be influenced by the language, or languages, you speak.
In our new book, we explore the many internal and external factors that influence and manipulate the way we think – from genetics to digital technology and advertising. And it appears that language can have a fascinating effect on the way we think about time and space.
The relationship between language and our perception of these two important dimensions is at the heart of a long-debated question: is thinking something universal and independent of language, or are our thoughts instead determined by it? Few researchers today believe that our thoughts are entirely shaped by language – we know, after all, that babies and toddlers think before they speak. But a growing number of experts believe language can influence how we think just as our thoughts and culture can shape how language develops. "It actually goes both ways," argues Thora Tenbrink, a linguist at Bangor University, in the UK.
It is hard to ignore the evidence that language influences thinking, argues Daniel Casasanto, a cognitive psychologist at Cornell University in the US. For example, we know that people remember things they pay more attention to. And different languages force us to pay attention to an array of different things, be it gender, movement or colour. "This is a principle of cognition that I don't think anyone would dispute," says Casasanto.
Linguists, neuroscientists, psychologists and others have spent decades trying to uncover the ways in which language influences our thoughts, often focusing on abstract concepts such as space and time which are open to interpretation. But getting scientific results isn't easy. If we just compare the thinking and behaviour of people who speak different languages, it's hard to be sure that any differences aren't down to culture, personality or something else entirely. The central role that language plays in expressing ourselves also makes it hard to unpick it from these other influences.
There are ways around this conundrum, however. Casasanto, for example, often teaches people in his lab to use metaphors from other languages (in their own tongue) and investigates what impact this has on their thinking. We know that people often use metaphors to think about abstract concepts – for example, a "high price", "long time" or "deep mystery". This way, you are not comparing people from different cultures, which may influence the results. Instead you are focusing on how thinking changes in the same people from the same culture while speaking in two different ways. Any cultural differences are therefore removed from the equation.
Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky, one of the pioneers of research into how language manipulates our thoughts, has shown that English speakers typically view time as a horizontal line. They might move meetings forward or push deadlines back. They also tend to view time as travelling from left to right, most likely in line with how you are reading the text on this page or the way the English language is written.
This relationship to the direction text is written and time appears to apply in other languages too. Hebrew speakers, for example, who read and write from right to left, picture time as following the same path as their text. If you asked a Hebrew speaker to place photos on a timeline, they would most likely start from the right with the oldest images and then locate more recent ones to the left.
Mandarin speakers, meanwhile, often envision time as a vertical line, where up represents the past and down the future. For example, they use the word xia ("down") when talking about future events, so that "next week" literally becomes "down week". As with English and Hebrew, this is also in line with how Mandarin traditionally was written and read – with lines running vertically, from the top of the page to the bottom.
This association between the way we read language and organise time in our thoughts also impacts our cognition when dealing with time. Speakers of different languages process temporal information faster if it's organised in a way that matches their language. One experiment, for example, showed that monolingual English people were quicker to determine whether a picture was from the past or the future (represented by science fiction-style images) if the button they had to press for the past was to the left of the button for future than if they were positioned the other way around. If the buttons were placed above or below each other, however, it made no difference.
Things start to get really strange, however, when looking at what happens in the minds of people who speak more than one language fluently. "With bilinguals, you are literally looking at two different languages in the same mind," explains Panos Athanasopoulos, a linguist at Lancaster University in the UK. "This means that you can establish a causal role of language on cognition, if you find that the same individual changes their behaviour when the language context changes."
Bilingual Mandarin and English speakers living in Singapore also showed a preference for left to right mental time mapping over right to left mental mapping. But amazingly, this group was also quicker to react to future oriented pictures if the future button was located below the past button – in line with Mandarin. Indeed, this also suggests that bilinguals may have two different views of time's direction – particularly if they learn both languages from an early age.
We aren't necessarily prisoners to thinking a certain way, though. Intriguingly, Casasanto has shown that you can quickly reverse people's mental time representation by training them to read mirror-reversed text, which goes in the opposite direction to what they're used to. They then react faster to statements that are consistent with time going the opposite way to what they are used to.
But things get even more interesting. In English and many other European languages, we typically view the past as being behind us and the future in front of us. In Swedish, for example, the word for future, framtid, literally means "front time". But in Aymara, spoken by the Aymara people who live in the Andes in Bolivia, Chile, Peru and Argentina, the word for future means "behind time". They reason that, because we can't see the future, it must be to our rear.
In fact, when the Aymara talk about the future they tend to make backwards gestures, whereas people who speak Spanish, for example, who view the future as being ahead of them, make forwards gestures. Similarly, like the Aymara, Mandarin speakers also imagine the future being behind them and the past ahead of them, calling the day before yesterday "front day" and the day after tomorrow "back day". Those that speak both Mandarin and English tend to switch between a forward and backward conception of the future, at times in ways that can clash with each other.
Casasanto noted that people tend to use spatial metaphors to talk about duration. For example, in English, French, German or the Scandinavian languages, a meeting can be "long" and a holiday "short". Casasanto showed that these metaphors are more than ways of talking – people conceptualise "lengths" of time as if they were lines in space. He initially believed this was universally true for all people, regardless of the languages they speak. But when presenting his findings at a conference in Greece, he was interrupted by a local researcher who insisted this wasn't correct for her language. "My first response was a bit dismissive," admits Casasanto, who had doubled down on his view. Eventually, though, he says that he "stopped talking and started listening".
And the result changed the course of his research to focus on language-related differences rather than universals in thinking. What he discovered was that Greek people tend to view time as a three-dimensional entity, like a bottle, which can fill up or empty out. A meeting, therefore, isn't "long" but "big" or "much", while a break isn't "short" but "small".
The same is also true in Spanish.
"I can talk about 'long time' [in English], but if I use this expression in Greek, people will look at me funny," explains Athanasopoulos, who is a native Greek speaker. "They will think I'm using it in a poetic way or in a way to emphasise it."
Athanasopoulos, who found Casasanto's results fascinating, set out to investigate this issue. He sat Swedish and Spanish speakers in front of a computer screen and asked them to estimate how much time had passed when either watching a line grow or a container fill up. The trick was that these events occurred at different rates. Monolingual Swedish speakers were easily misled when the line was shown – they believed a longer line meant more time had passed, even if that wasn't the case. Their time estimates weren't, however, influenced by a filling container. For Spanish speakers, it was the other way around.
Athanasopoulos then went further, looking at bilingual Spanish and Swedish speakers – and what he found was remarkable. When the Swedish word for duration (tid) appeared in the top corner of the computer screen, the participants estimated time using line length and weren't affected by container volume. But when this changed to the Spanish word for duration (duración), the results completely reversed. The extent to which the bilinguals were affected by the time metaphors of their second language was related to how proficient they were in that language.
These language quirks are fascinating, but how much impact do they really have on our thinking? Casasanto raises a curious point. When you imagine time on a line, each point is fixed so that two points of time cannot swap places – there's a strict arrow. But in a container, points of time are floating around – and potentially capable of swapping places. "I've long wondered whether our physics of time might be shaped by the fact that English, German and French speakers were instrumental in creating it," he says.
Interestingly, time is an increasingly tricky problem in physics, standing in the way of uniting its different branches. Physicists long imagined time as having an arrow, and ticking reliably from the past into the future. But modern theories are more complicated. In Einstein's theory of general relativity, for example, time doesn't seem to flow at all on the grandest scale of the universe – which is a weird idea even to physicists. Instead, the past, present and future all seem to exist simultaneously – as if they were points swimming around in a bottle. So perhaps the time as a line metaphor has been – and still is – holding back physics. (Read more about whether time goes in just one direction.)
"That would be a pretty remarkable effect of language on thought," says Casasanto.
Languages also encode time in their grammar. In English, for example, the future is one of three simple tenses, along with the past and the present – we say "it rained", "it rains" and "it will rain". But in German, you can say Morgen regnet, which means "it rains tomorrow" – you don't need to build the future into the grammar. The same is true for many other languages, including Mandarin, where external circumstances often denote that something is taking place in the future, such as "I go on holiday next month".
But does this affect how we think? In 2013, Keith Chen, a behavioural economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, set out to test whether people who speak languages that are "futureless" might feel closer to the future than those who speak other languages. For example, German, Chinese, Japanese, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages have no linguistic barrier between the present and the future, while "futured languages", such as English, French, Italian, Spanish and Greek, encourage speakers to view the future as something separate from the present.
He discovered that speakers of futureless languages were more likely to engage in future-focused activities. They were 31% more likely to have put money into savings in any given year and had accumulated 39% more wealth by retirement. They were also 24% less likely to smoke, 29% more likely to be physically active, and 13% less likely to be medically obese. This result held even when controlling for factors such as socioeconomic status and religion. In fact, OECD countries (the group of industrialised nations) with futureless languages save on average 5% more of their GDP per year.
This correlation may sound like a fluke, with complex historical and political reasons perhaps being the real drivers. But Chen has since investigated whether variables such as culture or how languages are related could be influencing the results. When he accounted for these factors, the correlation was weaker – but nevertheless held in most cases. "The hypothesis still seems surprisingly robust to me," argues Chen.
It is also backed by a 2018 experiment in the bilingual city Meran/Merano, in northern Italy, where about half the inhabitants speak German, a futureless language, and the other half Italian, a futured language. The researchers tested 1,154 primary school children's ability to resist temptation by asking them whether they would like two tokens (which could be exchanged for presents) at the end of the experiment or a bigger reward (three, four or five tokens) in four weeks.
They discovered that German-speaking children were on average 16 percentage points more likely to be able to wait for a larger number of tokens than Italian-speaking children – in line with Chen's hypothesis. The results still held when controlling for risk attitudes, IQ, family background and residential area.
But the effects of language can extend even further into our physical world – influencing how we orient ourselves in space. Different languages can force us to think in terms of specific "reference frames". As Boroditsky and her colleague Alice Gaby have shown, Aboriginal Kuuk Thaayorre people in Australia, for example, use cardinal directions – north, south, east, west – to talk about even mundane things, such as "the cup is on your south-west". This is called an "absolute" reference frame – the coordinates provided are independent of the observer's viewpoint or the location of reference objects.
But many languages, including English, use rather clumsy terms for spatial orientation – such as "next to", "left of", "behind" or "above". As if that wasn't enough, we also have to calculate which frame of reference they apply in. If someone tells you to pick up the keys on the right of a computer, do they mean on the computer's right-hand side or to the right of the computer from your perspective when facing it? The former is called an "intrinsic" reference frame (having two reference points: computer and keys) and the latter a "relative" reference frame (there are three reference points: computer, keys and observer).
And this can shape how we think – and navigate. Tenbrink's and her colleagues have compared the use of reference frames in English and Spanish. In one experiment, she asked people to decide whether an object, say a ball, was left or right of a central figure: an animal, human or object, based on two descriptions given in English or Spanish. For example: "I see a dog. The ball is on the left of the dog." Or: "I see a dog, the ball is on the dog's left."
In English, those two descriptions can denote two different sides of the dog, whereas in Spanish they both refer to what English speakers would think of as the "dog's left".
Spanish monolinguals located the ball using the intrinsic reference frame 78% of the time and English monolinguals 52% of the time. English speakers only chose the intrinsic frame if the possessive sentence, "the ball is on the dog's left", was used. The phrasing didn't matter to Spanish speakers. They simply preferred the intrinsic frame, unless the object was inanimate – it was a vase or a car rather than a dog, statue or human.
In a follow-up study, Tenbrink showed that bilingual Spanish and English speakers were somewhere in the middle between monolingual Spanish and English speakers, and were more influenced by the reference frame used most commonly in the country they lived in. "Spanish and English speakers interpret spatial relationships in a slightly different way," says Tenbrink. "And once the speaker speaks both languages, their preferences shift in different ways. I thought that was quite fascinating because people won't normally realise that their preferences shift because they have learned a second language."
Either way, it's something to keep in mind if you're picking a meeting place with someone who speaks a different language to you.
Speakers of some languages also focus more on actions than the wider context. When watching videos involving motion, English, Spanish, Arabic, and Russian speakers tended to describe what happened in terms of action, such as "a man walking". Speakers of German, Afrikaans and Swedish, on the other hand, focused on the holistic picture, including the end point, describing it as "a man walks towards a car".
Athanasopoulos recalls an incident which laid bare how this can interfere with navigation. While working on a linguistic project, he went for a hike with a group of international researchers in the English countryside. Aiming to get from a town to a small village, they had to get through a private estate by walking across a field, as instructed by a sign with the message: "Walk across the field diagonally." To the English and Spanish speakers, this was intuitive. But a German speaker hesitated, looking slightly confused. When shown the path across the field, at the end of which there was a church, she finally concluded: "Ah, so you mean we should walk towards the church?" She needed a start and end point to picture the diagonal the sign was referring to.
As this body of research grows, it is becoming increasingly clear that language is influencing how we think about the world around us and our passage through it. Which is not to say that any one language is "better" than another. As Tenbrink argues, "a language will develop what its users need".
But being aware of how languages differ can help you think, navigate and communicate better. And while being multilingual won't necessarily make you a genius, we all can gain a fresh perspective and a more flexible understanding of the world by learning a new language.
* Miriam Frankel and Matt Warren are science journalists and authors of Are You Thinking Clearly?
Link to original article on BBC:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221103-how-language-warps-the-way-you-perceive-time-and-space
The weird way language affects our sense of time and space
By Miriam Frankel and Matt Warren*
3rd November 2022
The languages we speak can have a surprising impact on the way we think about the world and even how we move through it.
If you were asked to walk diagonally across a field, would you know what to do? Or what if you were offered £20 ($23) today or double that amount in a month, would you be willing to wait? And how would you line up 10 photos of your parents if you were instructed to sort them in chronological order? Would you place them horizontally or vertically? In which direction would the timeline move?
These might seem like simple questions, but remarkably, your answers to these questions are likely to be influenced by the language, or languages, you speak.
In our new book, we explore the many internal and external factors that influence and manipulate the way we think – from genetics to digital technology and advertising. And it appears that language can have a fascinating effect on the way we think about time and space.
The relationship between language and our perception of these two important dimensions is at the heart of a long-debated question: is thinking something universal and independent of language, or are our thoughts instead determined by it? Few researchers today believe that our thoughts are entirely shaped by language – we know, after all, that babies and toddlers think before they speak. But a growing number of experts believe language can influence how we think just as our thoughts and culture can shape how language develops. "It actually goes both ways," argues Thora Tenbrink, a linguist at Bangor University, in the UK.
It is hard to ignore the evidence that language influences thinking, argues Daniel Casasanto, a cognitive psychologist at Cornell University in the US. For example, we know that people remember things they pay more attention to. And different languages force us to pay attention to an array of different things, be it gender, movement or colour. "This is a principle of cognition that I don't think anyone would dispute," says Casasanto.
Linguists, neuroscientists, psychologists and others have spent decades trying to uncover the ways in which language influences our thoughts, often focusing on abstract concepts such as space and time which are open to interpretation. But getting scientific results isn't easy. If we just compare the thinking and behaviour of people who speak different languages, it's hard to be sure that any differences aren't down to culture, personality or something else entirely. The central role that language plays in expressing ourselves also makes it hard to unpick it from these other influences.
There are ways around this conundrum, however. Casasanto, for example, often teaches people in his lab to use metaphors from other languages (in their own tongue) and investigates what impact this has on their thinking. We know that people often use metaphors to think about abstract concepts – for example, a "high price", "long time" or "deep mystery". This way, you are not comparing people from different cultures, which may influence the results. Instead you are focusing on how thinking changes in the same people from the same culture while speaking in two different ways. Any cultural differences are therefore removed from the equation.
Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky, one of the pioneers of research into how language manipulates our thoughts, has shown that English speakers typically view time as a horizontal line. They might move meetings forward or push deadlines back. They also tend to view time as travelling from left to right, most likely in line with how you are reading the text on this page or the way the English language is written.
This relationship to the direction text is written and time appears to apply in other languages too. Hebrew speakers, for example, who read and write from right to left, picture time as following the same path as their text. If you asked a Hebrew speaker to place photos on a timeline, they would most likely start from the right with the oldest images and then locate more recent ones to the left.
Mandarin speakers, meanwhile, often envision time as a vertical line, where up represents the past and down the future. For example, they use the word xia ("down") when talking about future events, so that "next week" literally becomes "down week". As with English and Hebrew, this is also in line with how Mandarin traditionally was written and read – with lines running vertically, from the top of the page to the bottom.
This association between the way we read language and organise time in our thoughts also impacts our cognition when dealing with time. Speakers of different languages process temporal information faster if it's organised in a way that matches their language. One experiment, for example, showed that monolingual English people were quicker to determine whether a picture was from the past or the future (represented by science fiction-style images) if the button they had to press for the past was to the left of the button for future than if they were positioned the other way around. If the buttons were placed above or below each other, however, it made no difference.
Things start to get really strange, however, when looking at what happens in the minds of people who speak more than one language fluently. "With bilinguals, you are literally looking at two different languages in the same mind," explains Panos Athanasopoulos, a linguist at Lancaster University in the UK. "This means that you can establish a causal role of language on cognition, if you find that the same individual changes their behaviour when the language context changes."
Bilingual Mandarin and English speakers living in Singapore also showed a preference for left to right mental time mapping over right to left mental mapping. But amazingly, this group was also quicker to react to future oriented pictures if the future button was located below the past button – in line with Mandarin. Indeed, this also suggests that bilinguals may have two different views of time's direction – particularly if they learn both languages from an early age.
We aren't necessarily prisoners to thinking a certain way, though. Intriguingly, Casasanto has shown that you can quickly reverse people's mental time representation by training them to read mirror-reversed text, which goes in the opposite direction to what they're used to. They then react faster to statements that are consistent with time going the opposite way to what they are used to.
But things get even more interesting. In English and many other European languages, we typically view the past as being behind us and the future in front of us. In Swedish, for example, the word for future, framtid, literally means "front time". But in Aymara, spoken by the Aymara people who live in the Andes in Bolivia, Chile, Peru and Argentina, the word for future means "behind time". They reason that, because we can't see the future, it must be to our rear.
In fact, when the Aymara talk about the future they tend to make backwards gestures, whereas people who speak Spanish, for example, who view the future as being ahead of them, make forwards gestures. Similarly, like the Aymara, Mandarin speakers also imagine the future being behind them and the past ahead of them, calling the day before yesterday "front day" and the day after tomorrow "back day". Those that speak both Mandarin and English tend to switch between a forward and backward conception of the future, at times in ways that can clash with each other.
Casasanto noted that people tend to use spatial metaphors to talk about duration. For example, in English, French, German or the Scandinavian languages, a meeting can be "long" and a holiday "short". Casasanto showed that these metaphors are more than ways of talking – people conceptualise "lengths" of time as if they were lines in space. He initially believed this was universally true for all people, regardless of the languages they speak. But when presenting his findings at a conference in Greece, he was interrupted by a local researcher who insisted this wasn't correct for her language. "My first response was a bit dismissive," admits Casasanto, who had doubled down on his view. Eventually, though, he says that he "stopped talking and started listening".
And the result changed the course of his research to focus on language-related differences rather than universals in thinking. What he discovered was that Greek people tend to view time as a three-dimensional entity, like a bottle, which can fill up or empty out. A meeting, therefore, isn't "long" but "big" or "much", while a break isn't "short" but "small".
The same is also true in Spanish.
"I can talk about 'long time' [in English], but if I use this expression in Greek, people will look at me funny," explains Athanasopoulos, who is a native Greek speaker. "They will think I'm using it in a poetic way or in a way to emphasise it."
Athanasopoulos, who found Casasanto's results fascinating, set out to investigate this issue. He sat Swedish and Spanish speakers in front of a computer screen and asked them to estimate how much time had passed when either watching a line grow or a container fill up. The trick was that these events occurred at different rates. Monolingual Swedish speakers were easily misled when the line was shown – they believed a longer line meant more time had passed, even if that wasn't the case. Their time estimates weren't, however, influenced by a filling container. For Spanish speakers, it was the other way around.
Athanasopoulos then went further, looking at bilingual Spanish and Swedish speakers – and what he found was remarkable. When the Swedish word for duration (tid) appeared in the top corner of the computer screen, the participants estimated time using line length and weren't affected by container volume. But when this changed to the Spanish word for duration (duración), the results completely reversed. The extent to which the bilinguals were affected by the time metaphors of their second language was related to how proficient they were in that language.
These language quirks are fascinating, but how much impact do they really have on our thinking? Casasanto raises a curious point. When you imagine time on a line, each point is fixed so that two points of time cannot swap places – there's a strict arrow. But in a container, points of time are floating around – and potentially capable of swapping places. "I've long wondered whether our physics of time might be shaped by the fact that English, German and French speakers were instrumental in creating it," he says.
Interestingly, time is an increasingly tricky problem in physics, standing in the way of uniting its different branches. Physicists long imagined time as having an arrow, and ticking reliably from the past into the future. But modern theories are more complicated. In Einstein's theory of general relativity, for example, time doesn't seem to flow at all on the grandest scale of the universe – which is a weird idea even to physicists. Instead, the past, present and future all seem to exist simultaneously – as if they were points swimming around in a bottle. So perhaps the time as a line metaphor has been – and still is – holding back physics. (Read more about whether time goes in just one direction.)
"That would be a pretty remarkable effect of language on thought," says Casasanto.
Languages also encode time in their grammar. In English, for example, the future is one of three simple tenses, along with the past and the present – we say "it rained", "it rains" and "it will rain". But in German, you can say Morgen regnet, which means "it rains tomorrow" – you don't need to build the future into the grammar. The same is true for many other languages, including Mandarin, where external circumstances often denote that something is taking place in the future, such as "I go on holiday next month".
But does this affect how we think? In 2013, Keith Chen, a behavioural economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, set out to test whether people who speak languages that are "futureless" might feel closer to the future than those who speak other languages. For example, German, Chinese, Japanese, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages have no linguistic barrier between the present and the future, while "futured languages", such as English, French, Italian, Spanish and Greek, encourage speakers to view the future as something separate from the present.
He discovered that speakers of futureless languages were more likely to engage in future-focused activities. They were 31% more likely to have put money into savings in any given year and had accumulated 39% more wealth by retirement. They were also 24% less likely to smoke, 29% more likely to be physically active, and 13% less likely to be medically obese. This result held even when controlling for factors such as socioeconomic status and religion. In fact, OECD countries (the group of industrialised nations) with futureless languages save on average 5% more of their GDP per year.
This correlation may sound like a fluke, with complex historical and political reasons perhaps being the real drivers. But Chen has since investigated whether variables such as culture or how languages are related could be influencing the results. When he accounted for these factors, the correlation was weaker – but nevertheless held in most cases. "The hypothesis still seems surprisingly robust to me," argues Chen.
It is also backed by a 2018 experiment in the bilingual city Meran/Merano, in northern Italy, where about half the inhabitants speak German, a futureless language, and the other half Italian, a futured language. The researchers tested 1,154 primary school children's ability to resist temptation by asking them whether they would like two tokens (which could be exchanged for presents) at the end of the experiment or a bigger reward (three, four or five tokens) in four weeks.
They discovered that German-speaking children were on average 16 percentage points more likely to be able to wait for a larger number of tokens than Italian-speaking children – in line with Chen's hypothesis. The results still held when controlling for risk attitudes, IQ, family background and residential area.
But the effects of language can extend even further into our physical world – influencing how we orient ourselves in space. Different languages can force us to think in terms of specific "reference frames". As Boroditsky and her colleague Alice Gaby have shown, Aboriginal Kuuk Thaayorre people in Australia, for example, use cardinal directions – north, south, east, west – to talk about even mundane things, such as "the cup is on your south-west". This is called an "absolute" reference frame – the coordinates provided are independent of the observer's viewpoint or the location of reference objects.
But many languages, including English, use rather clumsy terms for spatial orientation – such as "next to", "left of", "behind" or "above". As if that wasn't enough, we also have to calculate which frame of reference they apply in. If someone tells you to pick up the keys on the right of a computer, do they mean on the computer's right-hand side or to the right of the computer from your perspective when facing it? The former is called an "intrinsic" reference frame (having two reference points: computer and keys) and the latter a "relative" reference frame (there are three reference points: computer, keys and observer).
And this can shape how we think – and navigate. Tenbrink's and her colleagues have compared the use of reference frames in English and Spanish. In one experiment, she asked people to decide whether an object, say a ball, was left or right of a central figure: an animal, human or object, based on two descriptions given in English or Spanish. For example: "I see a dog. The ball is on the left of the dog." Or: "I see a dog, the ball is on the dog's left."
In English, those two descriptions can denote two different sides of the dog, whereas in Spanish they both refer to what English speakers would think of as the "dog's left".
Spanish monolinguals located the ball using the intrinsic reference frame 78% of the time and English monolinguals 52% of the time. English speakers only chose the intrinsic frame if the possessive sentence, "the ball is on the dog's left", was used. The phrasing didn't matter to Spanish speakers. They simply preferred the intrinsic frame, unless the object was inanimate – it was a vase or a car rather than a dog, statue or human.
In a follow-up study, Tenbrink showed that bilingual Spanish and English speakers were somewhere in the middle between monolingual Spanish and English speakers, and were more influenced by the reference frame used most commonly in the country they lived in. "Spanish and English speakers interpret spatial relationships in a slightly different way," says Tenbrink. "And once the speaker speaks both languages, their preferences shift in different ways. I thought that was quite fascinating because people won't normally realise that their preferences shift because they have learned a second language."
Either way, it's something to keep in mind if you're picking a meeting place with someone who speaks a different language to you.
Speakers of some languages also focus more on actions than the wider context. When watching videos involving motion, English, Spanish, Arabic, and Russian speakers tended to describe what happened in terms of action, such as "a man walking". Speakers of German, Afrikaans and Swedish, on the other hand, focused on the holistic picture, including the end point, describing it as "a man walks towards a car".
Athanasopoulos recalls an incident which laid bare how this can interfere with navigation. While working on a linguistic project, he went for a hike with a group of international researchers in the English countryside. Aiming to get from a town to a small village, they had to get through a private estate by walking across a field, as instructed by a sign with the message: "Walk across the field diagonally." To the English and Spanish speakers, this was intuitive. But a German speaker hesitated, looking slightly confused. When shown the path across the field, at the end of which there was a church, she finally concluded: "Ah, so you mean we should walk towards the church?" She needed a start and end point to picture the diagonal the sign was referring to.
As this body of research grows, it is becoming increasingly clear that language is influencing how we think about the world around us and our passage through it. Which is not to say that any one language is "better" than another. As Tenbrink argues, "a language will develop what its users need".
But being aware of how languages differ can help you think, navigate and communicate better. And while being multilingual won't necessarily make you a genius, we all can gain a fresh perspective and a more flexible understanding of the world by learning a new language.
* Miriam Frankel and Matt Warren are science journalists and authors of Are You Thinking Clearly?
Link to original article on BBC:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221103-how-language-warps-the-way-you-perceive-time-and-space
Saturday, March 5, 2022
"Exotic Contents" by Max Cooper
Avant garde composer/musician and visual artist Max Cooper (previously here) collaborated with Machine Learning and AI Researcher Xander Steenbrugge on his most recent track "Exotic Contents." The results are hypnotizing but the concepts described by Cooper and Steenbrugge are utterly fascinating.
Max Cooper:
I have been exploring the difficulties of communicating with words as part of my new Unspoken Words album project. I was thinking about how to visualise the idea, and started chatting to artist and machine learning specialist Xander Steenbrugge about a system for converting words to visual stories. The idea was to take the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who tackled this question of the difficulties of using words to explain our selves and our place in the world, and to have the AI system re-interpret these writings in visual form, making a direct visual representation of the Unspoken Words album concept.
It's interesting for me to see the incomprehensible philosophical language interpreted visually like this, full of symbolism and the boundaries between language, our selves, and the world, broken down into flowing abstraction. I haven't really taken it all in yet, I feel like there's more to discover in it than I can appreciate. The system has a lot more potential too, we will be running a version where you can have your own words turned into visuals and music as well, keep an eye out on my socials and mailers for that if you'd like to get involved.
The music was a similar departure from my usual interpretation of ideas, where I applied a half time drum and bass format with more aggression and sharpness of sound design. It’s a club track, but for me, an exotic form of club track. The name came from Wittgenstein’s private language argument, and the difficulty of communicating an entirely internal, subjective object to others when we can never directly show the object to each other. He uses the analogy of a beetle in a box, and I refer to the idea instead as our exotic contents.
Xander Steenbrugge:
From the very start of this collaboration, Max and myself were very eager to leverage the latest advances in AI to directly visualize language through the mind of the machine. For the past few months, in fact, I've been exploring this approach using a combination of two machine learning models: a generative system called VQGAN, which can generate pixels starting from a blank canvas, and a perceptual system called CLIP that guides this generator by scoring how well the generated imagery matches a given language prompt. Through this feedback loop, the system can be used to directly convert language into the visual domain.
After an early phase of experimentation with this technique, we quickly settled on Wittgenstein's Tractatus as a great narrative for this technique as it deals directly with the relationship between language and reality and aims to define the limits of science.
This final video then, is a direct visualisation of many of the statements posed by Wittgenstein in his seminal work, as interpreted by the AI.
Here you can find some examples of the timestamps and corresponding language prompts used to create the visual narrative:
0:00 "The world is everything that is the case"
0:16 "Any one can either be the case or not be the case, and everything else remain the same"
0:29 "I am my world"
0:41 "According to Wittgenstein: The limits of my language mean the limits of my world"
0:52 Tractatus quotes
1:00 "The picture is a model of reality"
1:26 "Objects form the substance of the world."
1:42 Tractatus quotes
1:56 "The picture is a model of reality"
2:10 "A name is a primitive sign"
2:23 "What can be shown cannot be said"
2:38 "There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical"
3:19 Tractatus quotes
5:15 "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent"
5:20 "The world is everything, I am my world"
https://maxcooper.net/exotic-contents
Max Cooper:
I have been exploring the difficulties of communicating with words as part of my new Unspoken Words album project. I was thinking about how to visualise the idea, and started chatting to artist and machine learning specialist Xander Steenbrugge about a system for converting words to visual stories. The idea was to take the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who tackled this question of the difficulties of using words to explain our selves and our place in the world, and to have the AI system re-interpret these writings in visual form, making a direct visual representation of the Unspoken Words album concept.
It's interesting for me to see the incomprehensible philosophical language interpreted visually like this, full of symbolism and the boundaries between language, our selves, and the world, broken down into flowing abstraction. I haven't really taken it all in yet, I feel like there's more to discover in it than I can appreciate. The system has a lot more potential too, we will be running a version where you can have your own words turned into visuals and music as well, keep an eye out on my socials and mailers for that if you'd like to get involved.
The music was a similar departure from my usual interpretation of ideas, where I applied a half time drum and bass format with more aggression and sharpness of sound design. It’s a club track, but for me, an exotic form of club track. The name came from Wittgenstein’s private language argument, and the difficulty of communicating an entirely internal, subjective object to others when we can never directly show the object to each other. He uses the analogy of a beetle in a box, and I refer to the idea instead as our exotic contents.
Xander Steenbrugge:
From the very start of this collaboration, Max and myself were very eager to leverage the latest advances in AI to directly visualize language through the mind of the machine. For the past few months, in fact, I've been exploring this approach using a combination of two machine learning models: a generative system called VQGAN, which can generate pixels starting from a blank canvas, and a perceptual system called CLIP that guides this generator by scoring how well the generated imagery matches a given language prompt. Through this feedback loop, the system can be used to directly convert language into the visual domain.
After an early phase of experimentation with this technique, we quickly settled on Wittgenstein's Tractatus as a great narrative for this technique as it deals directly with the relationship between language and reality and aims to define the limits of science.
This final video then, is a direct visualisation of many of the statements posed by Wittgenstein in his seminal work, as interpreted by the AI.
Here you can find some examples of the timestamps and corresponding language prompts used to create the visual narrative:
0:00 "The world is everything that is the case"
0:16 "Any one can either be the case or not be the case, and everything else remain the same"
0:29 "I am my world"
0:41 "According to Wittgenstein: The limits of my language mean the limits of my world"
0:52 Tractatus quotes
1:00 "The picture is a model of reality"
1:26 "Objects form the substance of the world."
1:42 Tractatus quotes
1:56 "The picture is a model of reality"
2:10 "A name is a primitive sign"
2:23 "What can be shown cannot be said"
2:38 "There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical"
3:19 Tractatus quotes
5:15 "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent"
5:20 "The world is everything, I am my world"
https://maxcooper.net/exotic-contents
Tuesday, February 1, 2022
The Evolution of the Alphabet by Matt Baker
This amazing visualization from Matt Baker of UsefulCharts demonstrates how our modern Latin script used in English evolved from Greek, and other, much older alphabets.
Matt Baker says, "I originally titled the chart 'Evolution of the English alphabet' and many people commented that there is no such thing as an English alphabet and that the chart should be titled 'Evolution of the Latin alphabet'. Actually, both titles are correct. Obviously, many European languages use the same Latin script. But some use a slightly different number of letters. When one is referring to the set of Latin letters used for a particular language, it's ok to refer to that set as the '[language name] alphabet'. However, in the end, in order to be more inclusive, I decided to change the title to simply 'Evolution of the Alphabet' and use the row titles to make it clear that it is the evolution of the standard Latin script that is being shown (as opposed to say, the Cyrillic or Hebrew scripts)."
You can see how the chart begins with something called the Proto-Sinaitic script which was derived in Canaan, around the biblical Land of Israel. It was repurposed from Egyptian hieroglyphs that were commonly seen in the area (its name comes from Mount Sinai). This Proto-Sinaitic script influenced other Semitic languages: it was the precursor to the Phoenician alphabet, which was used in the area of modern-day Lebanon and spread across the Mediterranean, becoming the basis for Arabic, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and of course, Greek. The first forms of the Archaic Greek script are dated circa 750 BCE, which then grew into Latin, with Archaic Latin script appearing circa 500 BCE. The evolution into Roman script, with the same recognizable letters used in our modern English, occurred 500 years later in 1 CE. Fascinating.
https://usefulcharts.com/blogs/charts/evolution-of-the-english-alphabet
Matt Baker says, "I originally titled the chart 'Evolution of the English alphabet' and many people commented that there is no such thing as an English alphabet and that the chart should be titled 'Evolution of the Latin alphabet'. Actually, both titles are correct. Obviously, many European languages use the same Latin script. But some use a slightly different number of letters. When one is referring to the set of Latin letters used for a particular language, it's ok to refer to that set as the '[language name] alphabet'. However, in the end, in order to be more inclusive, I decided to change the title to simply 'Evolution of the Alphabet' and use the row titles to make it clear that it is the evolution of the standard Latin script that is being shown (as opposed to say, the Cyrillic or Hebrew scripts)."
You can see how the chart begins with something called the Proto-Sinaitic script which was derived in Canaan, around the biblical Land of Israel. It was repurposed from Egyptian hieroglyphs that were commonly seen in the area (its name comes from Mount Sinai). This Proto-Sinaitic script influenced other Semitic languages: it was the precursor to the Phoenician alphabet, which was used in the area of modern-day Lebanon and spread across the Mediterranean, becoming the basis for Arabic, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and of course, Greek. The first forms of the Archaic Greek script are dated circa 750 BCE, which then grew into Latin, with Archaic Latin script appearing circa 500 BCE. The evolution into Roman script, with the same recognizable letters used in our modern English, occurred 500 years later in 1 CE. Fascinating.
Friday, November 13, 2020
Tips To Learning A New Language Quickly
The 75 most common words make up 40% of occurrences
EXPRESSIONS OF POLITENESS (about 50 expressions)
The 200 most common words make up 50% of occurrences
The 524 most common words make up 60% of occurrences
The 1257 most common words make up 70% of occurrences
The 2925 most common words make up 80% of occurrences
The 7444 most common words make up 90% of occurrences
The 13374 most common words make up 95% of occurrences
The 25508 most common words make up 99% of occurrences
--‘Yes’ and 'no’: yes, no, absolutely, no way, exactly.
--Question words: when? where? how? how much? how many? why? what? who? which? whose?
--Apologizing: excuse me, sorry to interrupt, well now, I’m afraid so, I’m afraid not.
--Meeting and parting: good morning, good afternoon, good evening, hello, goodbye, cheers, see you later, pleased to meet you, nice to have met.
--Interjections: please, thank you, don’t mention it, sorry, it’ll be done, I agree, congratulations, thank heavens, nonsense.
--Question words: when? where? how? how much? how many? why? what? who? which? whose?
--Apologizing: excuse me, sorry to interrupt, well now, I’m afraid so, I’m afraid not.
--Meeting and parting: good morning, good afternoon, good evening, hello, goodbye, cheers, see you later, pleased to meet you, nice to have met.
--Interjections: please, thank you, don’t mention it, sorry, it’ll be done, I agree, congratulations, thank heavens, nonsense.
NOUNS (about 120 words)
--Time: morning, afternoon, evening, night; Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; spring, summer, autumn, winter; time, occasion, minute, half-hour, hour, day, week, month, year.
--People: family, relative, mother, father, son, daughter, sister, brother, husband, wife; colleague, friend, boyfriend, girlfriend; people, person, human being, man, woman, lady, gentleman, boy, girl, child.
--Objects: address, bag, book, car, clothes, key, letter (=to post), light (=lamp), money, name, newspaper, pen, pencil, picture, suitcase, thing, ticket.
--Places: place, world, country, town, street, road, school, shop, house, apartment, room, ground; Britain, name of the foreign country, British town-names, foreign town-names.
--Abstract: accident, beginning, change, color, damage, fun, half, help, joke, journey, language, English, name of the foreign language, letter (of alphabet), life, love, mistake, news, page, pain, part, question, reason, sort, surprise, way (=method), weather, work.
--Other: hand, foot, head, eye, mouth, voice; the left, the right; the top, the bottom, the side; air, water, sun, bread, food, paper, noise.
--Time: morning, afternoon, evening, night; Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; spring, summer, autumn, winter; time, occasion, minute, half-hour, hour, day, week, month, year.
--People: family, relative, mother, father, son, daughter, sister, brother, husband, wife; colleague, friend, boyfriend, girlfriend; people, person, human being, man, woman, lady, gentleman, boy, girl, child.
--Objects: address, bag, book, car, clothes, key, letter (=to post), light (=lamp), money, name, newspaper, pen, pencil, picture, suitcase, thing, ticket.
--Places: place, world, country, town, street, road, school, shop, house, apartment, room, ground; Britain, name of the foreign country, British town-names, foreign town-names.
--Abstract: accident, beginning, change, color, damage, fun, half, help, joke, journey, language, English, name of the foreign language, letter (of alphabet), life, love, mistake, news, page, pain, part, question, reason, sort, surprise, way (=method), weather, work.
--Other: hand, foot, head, eye, mouth, voice; the left, the right; the top, the bottom, the side; air, water, sun, bread, food, paper, noise.
PREPOSITIONS (about 40 words)
--General: of, to, at, for, from, in, on.
--Logical: about, according-to, except, like, against, with, without, by, despite, instead of.
--Space: into, out of, outside, towards, away from, behind, in front of, beside, next to, between, above, on top of, below, under, underneath, near to, a long way from, through.
--Time: after, ago, before, during, since, until.
--General: of, to, at, for, from, in, on.
--Logical: about, according-to, except, like, against, with, without, by, despite, instead of.
--Space: into, out of, outside, towards, away from, behind, in front of, beside, next to, between, above, on top of, below, under, underneath, near to, a long way from, through.
--Time: after, ago, before, during, since, until.
DETERMINERS (about 80 words)
--Articles and numbers: a, the; nos. 0–20; nos. 30–100; nos. 200–1000; last, next, 1st–12th.
--Demonstrative: this, that.
--Possessive: my, your, his, her, its, our, their.
--Quantifiers: all, some, no, any, many, much, more, less, a few, several, whole, a little, a lot of.
--Comparators: both, neither, each, every, other, another, same, different, such.
--Articles and numbers: a, the; nos. 0–20; nos. 30–100; nos. 200–1000; last, next, 1st–12th.
--Demonstrative: this, that.
--Possessive: my, your, his, her, its, our, their.
--Quantifiers: all, some, no, any, many, much, more, less, a few, several, whole, a little, a lot of.
--Comparators: both, neither, each, every, other, another, same, different, such.
ADJECTIVES (about 80 words)
--Color: black, blue, green, red, white, yellow.
--Evaluative: bad, good, terrible; important, urgent, necessary; possible, impossible; right, wrong, true.
--General: big, little, small, heavy; high, low; hot, cold, warm; easy, difficult; cheap, expensive; clean, dirty; beautiful, funny (=comical), funny (=odd), usual, common (=shared), nice, pretty, wonderful; boring, interesting, dangerous, safe; short, tall, long; new, old; calm, clear, dry; fast, slow; finished, free, full, light (=not dark), open, quiet, ready, strong.
--Personal: afraid, alone, angry, certain, cheerful, dead, famous, glad, happy, ill, kind, married, pleased, sorry, stupid, surprised, tired, well, worried, young.
--Color: black, blue, green, red, white, yellow.
--Evaluative: bad, good, terrible; important, urgent, necessary; possible, impossible; right, wrong, true.
--General: big, little, small, heavy; high, low; hot, cold, warm; easy, difficult; cheap, expensive; clean, dirty; beautiful, funny (=comical), funny (=odd), usual, common (=shared), nice, pretty, wonderful; boring, interesting, dangerous, safe; short, tall, long; new, old; calm, clear, dry; fast, slow; finished, free, full, light (=not dark), open, quiet, ready, strong.
--Personal: afraid, alone, angry, certain, cheerful, dead, famous, glad, happy, ill, kind, married, pleased, sorry, stupid, surprised, tired, well, worried, young.
VERBS (about 100 words)
arrive, ask, be, be able to, become, begin, believe, borrow, bring, buy, can, change, check, collect, come, continue, cry, do, drop, eat, fall, feel, find, finish, forget, give, going to, have, have to, hear, help, hold, hope, hurt (oneself), hurt (someone else), keep, know, laugh, learn, leave, lend, let (=allow), lie down, like, listen, live (=be alive), live (=reside), look (at), look for, lose, love, make, may (=permission), may (=possibility), mean, meet, must, need, obtain, open, ought to, pay, play, put, read, remember, say, see, sell, send, should, show, shut, sing, sleep, speak, stand, stay, stop, suggest, take, talk, teach, think, travel, try, understand, use, used to, wait for, walk, want, watch, will, work (=operate), work (=toil), worry, would, write.
arrive, ask, be, be able to, become, begin, believe, borrow, bring, buy, can, change, check, collect, come, continue, cry, do, drop, eat, fall, feel, find, finish, forget, give, going to, have, have to, hear, help, hold, hope, hurt (oneself), hurt (someone else), keep, know, laugh, learn, leave, lend, let (=allow), lie down, like, listen, live (=be alive), live (=reside), look (at), look for, lose, love, make, may (=permission), may (=possibility), mean, meet, must, need, obtain, open, ought to, pay, play, put, read, remember, say, see, sell, send, should, show, shut, sing, sleep, speak, stand, stay, stop, suggest, take, talk, teach, think, travel, try, understand, use, used to, wait for, walk, want, watch, will, work (=operate), work (=toil), worry, would, write.
PRONOUNS (about 40 words)
--Personal: I, you, he, she, it, we, they, one; myself, yourself, himself, herself, itself, ourselves, yourselves, themselves.
--Possessive: mine, yours, his, hers, its, ours, theirs.
--Demonstrative: this, that.
--Universal: everyone, everybody, everything, each, both, all, one, another.
--Indefinite: someone, somebody, something, some, a few, a little, more, less; anyone, anybody, anything, any, either, much, many.
--Negative: no-one, nobody, nothing, none, neither.
--Personal: I, you, he, she, it, we, they, one; myself, yourself, himself, herself, itself, ourselves, yourselves, themselves.
--Possessive: mine, yours, his, hers, its, ours, theirs.
--Demonstrative: this, that.
--Universal: everyone, everybody, everything, each, both, all, one, another.
--Indefinite: someone, somebody, something, some, a few, a little, more, less; anyone, anybody, anything, any, either, much, many.
--Negative: no-one, nobody, nothing, none, neither.
ADVERBS (about 60 words)
--Place: here, there, above, over, below, in front, behind, nearby, a long way away, inside, outside, to the right, to the left, somewhere, anywhere, everywhere, nowhere, home, upstairs, downstairs.
--Time: now, soon, immediately, quickly, finally, again, once, for a long time, today, generally, sometimes, always, often, before, after, early, late, never, not yet, still, already, then (=at that time), then (=next), yesterday, tomorrow, tonight.
--Quantifiers: a little, about (=approximately), almost, at least, completely, very, enough, exactly, just, not, too much, more, less.
--Manner: also, especially, gradually, of course, only, otherwise, perhaps, probably, quite, so, then (=therefore), too (=also), unfortunately, very much, well.
--Place: here, there, above, over, below, in front, behind, nearby, a long way away, inside, outside, to the right, to the left, somewhere, anywhere, everywhere, nowhere, home, upstairs, downstairs.
--Time: now, soon, immediately, quickly, finally, again, once, for a long time, today, generally, sometimes, always, often, before, after, early, late, never, not yet, still, already, then (=at that time), then (=next), yesterday, tomorrow, tonight.
--Quantifiers: a little, about (=approximately), almost, at least, completely, very, enough, exactly, just, not, too much, more, less.
--Manner: also, especially, gradually, of course, only, otherwise, perhaps, probably, quite, so, then (=therefore), too (=also), unfortunately, very much, well.
CONJUNCTIONS (about 30 words)
--Coordinating: and, but, or; as, than, like.
--Time & Place: when, while, before, after, since (=time), until; where.
--Manner & Logic: how, why, because, since (=because), although, if; what, who, whom, whose, which, that.
--Coordinating: and, but, or; as, than, like.
--Time & Place: when, while, before, after, since (=time), until; where.
--Manner & Logic: how, why, because, since (=because), although, if; what, who, whom, whose, which, that.
Tuesday, October 9, 2018
A Bubbler? What's a Bubbler?
Author Josh Katz did a fascinating survey of regional terms and words that we use across the United States. The same object can have wildly different terms depending on the area of the country. He published his results in his book SPEAKING AMERICAN: HOW Y'ALL, YOUSE, AND YOU GUYS TALK: A VISUAL GUIDE.
https://www.amazon.com/Speaking-American-Youse-Visual-Guide/dp/0544703391
https://www.amazon.com/Speaking-American-Youse-Visual-Guide/dp/0544703391
Sunday, October 7, 2018
The International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet
After many versions in existence since WW I, the English speaking world adopted the final version of The International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet in 1959. It could come in useful...memorize it.
Sunday, March 4, 2018
Ikigai
From Wikipedia:
Ikigai (生き甲斐, pronounced [ikiɡai]) is a Japanese concept that means "a reason for being." It is similar to the French phrase Raison d'être. Everyone, according to Japanese culture, has an ikigai. Finding it requires a deep and often lengthy search of self. Such a search is important to the cultural belief that discovering one's ikigai brings satisfaction and meaning to life.[1] For some, it might be work, hobbies and raising children.
The term ikigai compounds two Japanese words: iki (wikt:生き) meaning "life; alive" and kai (甲斐) "(an) effect; (a) result; (a) fruit; (a) worth; (a) use; (a) benefit; (no, little) avail" (sequentially voiced as gai) "a reason for living [being alive]; a meaning for [to] life; what [something that] makes life worth living; a raison d'etre".
In the culture of Okinawa, ikigai is thought of as "a reason to get up in the morning"; that is, a reason to enjoy life. In a TED Talk, Dan Buettner suggested ikigai as one of the reasons people in the area had such long lives.
The word ikigai is usually used to indicate the source of value in one's life or the things that make one's life worthwhile. Secondly, the word is used to refer to mental and spiritual circumstances under which individuals feel that their lives are valuable. It's not linked to one's financial status[5]. Even if a person feels that the present is dark, but they have a goal in mind, they may feel ikigai. Behaviours that make us feel ikigai are not actions we are forced to take—these are natural and spontaneous actions.
In the article named Ikigai — jibun no kanosei, kaikasaseru katei ("Ikigai: the process of allowing the self's possibilities to blossom") Kobayashi Tsukasa says that "people can feel real ikigai only when, on the basis of personal maturity, the satisfaction of various desires, love and happiness, encounters with others, and a sense of the value of life, they proceed toward self-realization."
Monday, February 6, 2017
"The 'Untranslatable' Emotions You Never Knew You Had" by David Robson
The 'Untranslatable' Emotions You Never Knew You Had
From gigil to wabi-sabi and tarab, there are many foreign emotion words with no English equivalent. Learning to identify and cultivate these experiences could give you a richer and more successful life.
By David Robson
26 January 2017
Have you ever felt a little mbuki-mvuki – the irresistible urge to “shuck off your clothes as you dance”? Perhaps a little kilig – the jittery fluttering feeling as you talk to someone you fancy? How about uitwaaien – which encapsulates the revitalising effects of taking a walk in the wind?
These words – taken from Bantu, Tagalog, and Dutch – have no direct English equivalent, but they represent very precise emotional experiences that are neglected in our language. And if Tim Lomas at the University of East London has his way, they might soon become much more familiar.
Lomas’s Positive Lexicography Project aims to capture the many flavours of good feelings (some of which are distinctly bittersweet) found across the world, in the hope that we might start to incorporate them all into our daily lives. We have already borrowed many emotion words from other languages, after all – think “frisson”, from French, or “schadenfreude”, from German – but there are many more that have not yet wormed their way into our vocabulary. Lomas has found hundreds of these "untranslatable" experiences so far – and he’s only just begun.
Learning these words, he hopes, will offer us all a richer and more nuanced understanding of ourselves. “They offer a very different way of seeing the world.”
Lomas says he was first inspired after hearing a talk on the Finnish concept of sisu, which is a sort of “extraordinary determination in the face of adversity”. According to Finnish speakers, the English ideas of “grit”, “perseverance” or “resilience” do not come close to describing the inner strength encapsulated in their native term. It was "untranslatable" in the sense that there was no direct or easy equivalent encoded within the English vocabulary that could capture that deep resonance.
Intrigued, he began to hunt for further examples, scouring the academic literature and asking every foreign acquaintance for their own suggestions. The first results of this project were published in the Journal of Positive Psychology last year.
Many of the terms referred to highly specific positive feelings, which often depend on very particular circumstances:
*Desbundar (Portuguese) – to shed one’s inhibitions in having fun
*Tarab (Arabic) – a musically induced state of ecstasy or enchantment
*Shinrin-yoku (Japanese) – the relaxation gained from bathing in the forest, figuratively or literally
*Gigil (Tagalog) – the irresistible urge to pinch or squeeze someone because they are loved or cherished
*Yuan bei (Chinese) – a sense of complete and perfect accomplishment
*Iktsuarpok (Inuit) – the anticipation one feels when waiting for someone, whereby one keeps going outside to check if they have arrived
But others represented more complex and bittersweet experiences, which could be crucial to our growth and overall flourishing.
*Natsukashii (Japanese) – a nostalgic longing for the past, with happiness for the fond memory, yet sadness that it is no longer
*Wabi-sabi (Japanese) – a “dark, desolate sublimity” centred on transience and imperfection in beauty
*Saudade (Portuguese) – a melancholic longing or nostalgia for a person, place or thing that is far away either spatially or in time – a vague, dreaming wistfulness for phenomena that may not even exist
*Sehnsucht (German) – “life-longings”, an intense desire for alternative states and realisations of life, even if they are unattainable
In addition to these emotions, Lomas’s lexicography also charted the personal characteristics and behaviours that might determine our long-term well-being and the ways we interact with other people.
*Dadirri (Australian aboriginal) term – a deep, spiritual act of reflective and respectful listening
*Pihentagyú (Hungarian) – literally meaning “with a relaxed brain”, it describes quick-witted people who can come up with sophisticated jokes or solutions
*Desenrascanço (Portuguese) – to artfully disentangle oneself from a troublesome situation
*Sukha (Sanskrit) – genuine lasting happiness independent of circumstances
*Orenda (Huron) – the power of the human will to change the world in the face of powerful forces such as fate
You can view many more examples on his website, where there is also the opportunity to submit your own. Lomas readily admits that many of the descriptions he has offered so far are only an approximation of the term's true meaning. "The whole project is a work in progress, and I’m continually aiming to refine the definitions of the words in the list," he says. "I definitely welcome people’s feedback and suggestions in that regard."
In the future, Lomas hopes that other psychologists may begin to explore the causes and consequences of these experiences – to extend our understanding of emotion beyond the English concepts that have dominated research so far.
But studying these terms will not just be of scientific interest; Lomas suspects that familiarising ourselves with the words might actually change the way we feel ourselves, by drawing our attention to fleeting sensations we had long ignored.
“In our stream of consciousness – that wash of different sensations feelings and emotions – there’s so much to process that a lot passes us by,” Lomas says. “The feelings we have learned to recognise and label are the ones we notice – but there’s a lot more that we may not be aware of. And so I think if we are given these new words, they can help us articulate whole areas of experience we’ve only dimly noticed.”
As evidence, Lomas points to the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett at Northeastern University, who has shown that our abilities to identify and label our emotions can have far-reaching effects.
Her research was inspired by the observation that certain people use different emotion words interchangeably, while others are highly precise in their descriptions. “Some people use words like anxious, afraid, angry, disgusted to refer to a general affective state of feeling bad,” she explains. “For them, they are synonyms, whereas for other people they are distinctive feelings with distinctive actions associated with them.”
This is called “emotion granularity” and she usually measures this by asking the participants to rate their feelings on each day over the period of a few weeks, before she calculates the variation and nuances within their reports: whether the same old terms always coincide, for instance.
Importantly, she has found that this then determines how well we cope with life. If you are better able to pin down whether you are feeling despair or anxiety, for instance, you might be better able to decide how to remedy those feelings: whether to talk to a friend, or watch a funny film. Or being able to identify your hope in the face of disappointment might help you to look for new solutions to your problem.
In this way, emotion vocabulary is a bit like a directory, allowing you to call up a greater number of strategies to cope with life. Sure enough, people who score highly on emotion granularity are better able to recover more quickly from stress and are less likely to drink alcohol as a way of recovering from bad news. It can even improve your academic success. Marc Brackett at Yale University has found that teaching 10 and 11-year-old children a richer emotional vocabulary improved their end-of-year grades, and promoted better behaviour in the classroom. “The more granular our experience of emotion is, the more capable we are to make sense of our inner lives,” he says.
Both Brackett and Barrett agree that Lomas’s “positive lexicography” could be a good prompt to start identifying the subtler contours of our emotional landscape. “I think it is useful – you can think of the words and the concepts they are associated with as tools for living,” says Barrett. They might even inspire us to try new experiences, or appreciate old ones in a new light.
It’s a direction of research that Lomas would like to explore in the future. In the meantime, Lomas is still continuing to build his lexicography – which has grown to nearly a thousand terms. Of all the words he has found so far, Lomas says that he most often finds himself pondering Japanese concepts such as wabi-sabi (that “dark, desolate sublimity” involving transience and imperfection). “It speaks to this idea of finding beauty in phenomena that are aged and imperfect,” he says. “If we saw the world through those eyes, it could be a different way of engaging in life.”
Original BBC Future article here:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170126-the-untranslatable-emotions-you-never-knew-you-had
From gigil to wabi-sabi and tarab, there are many foreign emotion words with no English equivalent. Learning to identify and cultivate these experiences could give you a richer and more successful life.
By David Robson
26 January 2017
Have you ever felt a little mbuki-mvuki – the irresistible urge to “shuck off your clothes as you dance”? Perhaps a little kilig – the jittery fluttering feeling as you talk to someone you fancy? How about uitwaaien – which encapsulates the revitalising effects of taking a walk in the wind?
These words – taken from Bantu, Tagalog, and Dutch – have no direct English equivalent, but they represent very precise emotional experiences that are neglected in our language. And if Tim Lomas at the University of East London has his way, they might soon become much more familiar.
Lomas’s Positive Lexicography Project aims to capture the many flavours of good feelings (some of which are distinctly bittersweet) found across the world, in the hope that we might start to incorporate them all into our daily lives. We have already borrowed many emotion words from other languages, after all – think “frisson”, from French, or “schadenfreude”, from German – but there are many more that have not yet wormed their way into our vocabulary. Lomas has found hundreds of these "untranslatable" experiences so far – and he’s only just begun.
Learning these words, he hopes, will offer us all a richer and more nuanced understanding of ourselves. “They offer a very different way of seeing the world.”
Lomas says he was first inspired after hearing a talk on the Finnish concept of sisu, which is a sort of “extraordinary determination in the face of adversity”. According to Finnish speakers, the English ideas of “grit”, “perseverance” or “resilience” do not come close to describing the inner strength encapsulated in their native term. It was "untranslatable" in the sense that there was no direct or easy equivalent encoded within the English vocabulary that could capture that deep resonance.
Intrigued, he began to hunt for further examples, scouring the academic literature and asking every foreign acquaintance for their own suggestions. The first results of this project were published in the Journal of Positive Psychology last year.
Many of the terms referred to highly specific positive feelings, which often depend on very particular circumstances:
*Desbundar (Portuguese) – to shed one’s inhibitions in having fun
*Tarab (Arabic) – a musically induced state of ecstasy or enchantment
*Shinrin-yoku (Japanese) – the relaxation gained from bathing in the forest, figuratively or literally
*Gigil (Tagalog) – the irresistible urge to pinch or squeeze someone because they are loved or cherished
*Yuan bei (Chinese) – a sense of complete and perfect accomplishment
*Iktsuarpok (Inuit) – the anticipation one feels when waiting for someone, whereby one keeps going outside to check if they have arrived
But others represented more complex and bittersweet experiences, which could be crucial to our growth and overall flourishing.
*Natsukashii (Japanese) – a nostalgic longing for the past, with happiness for the fond memory, yet sadness that it is no longer
*Wabi-sabi (Japanese) – a “dark, desolate sublimity” centred on transience and imperfection in beauty
*Saudade (Portuguese) – a melancholic longing or nostalgia for a person, place or thing that is far away either spatially or in time – a vague, dreaming wistfulness for phenomena that may not even exist
*Sehnsucht (German) – “life-longings”, an intense desire for alternative states and realisations of life, even if they are unattainable
In addition to these emotions, Lomas’s lexicography also charted the personal characteristics and behaviours that might determine our long-term well-being and the ways we interact with other people.
*Dadirri (Australian aboriginal) term – a deep, spiritual act of reflective and respectful listening
*Pihentagyú (Hungarian) – literally meaning “with a relaxed brain”, it describes quick-witted people who can come up with sophisticated jokes or solutions
*Desenrascanço (Portuguese) – to artfully disentangle oneself from a troublesome situation
*Sukha (Sanskrit) – genuine lasting happiness independent of circumstances
*Orenda (Huron) – the power of the human will to change the world in the face of powerful forces such as fate
You can view many more examples on his website, where there is also the opportunity to submit your own. Lomas readily admits that many of the descriptions he has offered so far are only an approximation of the term's true meaning. "The whole project is a work in progress, and I’m continually aiming to refine the definitions of the words in the list," he says. "I definitely welcome people’s feedback and suggestions in that regard."
In the future, Lomas hopes that other psychologists may begin to explore the causes and consequences of these experiences – to extend our understanding of emotion beyond the English concepts that have dominated research so far.
But studying these terms will not just be of scientific interest; Lomas suspects that familiarising ourselves with the words might actually change the way we feel ourselves, by drawing our attention to fleeting sensations we had long ignored.
“In our stream of consciousness – that wash of different sensations feelings and emotions – there’s so much to process that a lot passes us by,” Lomas says. “The feelings we have learned to recognise and label are the ones we notice – but there’s a lot more that we may not be aware of. And so I think if we are given these new words, they can help us articulate whole areas of experience we’ve only dimly noticed.”
As evidence, Lomas points to the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett at Northeastern University, who has shown that our abilities to identify and label our emotions can have far-reaching effects.
Her research was inspired by the observation that certain people use different emotion words interchangeably, while others are highly precise in their descriptions. “Some people use words like anxious, afraid, angry, disgusted to refer to a general affective state of feeling bad,” she explains. “For them, they are synonyms, whereas for other people they are distinctive feelings with distinctive actions associated with them.”
This is called “emotion granularity” and she usually measures this by asking the participants to rate their feelings on each day over the period of a few weeks, before she calculates the variation and nuances within their reports: whether the same old terms always coincide, for instance.
Importantly, she has found that this then determines how well we cope with life. If you are better able to pin down whether you are feeling despair or anxiety, for instance, you might be better able to decide how to remedy those feelings: whether to talk to a friend, or watch a funny film. Or being able to identify your hope in the face of disappointment might help you to look for new solutions to your problem.
In this way, emotion vocabulary is a bit like a directory, allowing you to call up a greater number of strategies to cope with life. Sure enough, people who score highly on emotion granularity are better able to recover more quickly from stress and are less likely to drink alcohol as a way of recovering from bad news. It can even improve your academic success. Marc Brackett at Yale University has found that teaching 10 and 11-year-old children a richer emotional vocabulary improved their end-of-year grades, and promoted better behaviour in the classroom. “The more granular our experience of emotion is, the more capable we are to make sense of our inner lives,” he says.
Both Brackett and Barrett agree that Lomas’s “positive lexicography” could be a good prompt to start identifying the subtler contours of our emotional landscape. “I think it is useful – you can think of the words and the concepts they are associated with as tools for living,” says Barrett. They might even inspire us to try new experiences, or appreciate old ones in a new light.
It’s a direction of research that Lomas would like to explore in the future. In the meantime, Lomas is still continuing to build his lexicography – which has grown to nearly a thousand terms. Of all the words he has found so far, Lomas says that he most often finds himself pondering Japanese concepts such as wabi-sabi (that “dark, desolate sublimity” involving transience and imperfection). “It speaks to this idea of finding beauty in phenomena that are aged and imperfect,” he says. “If we saw the world through those eyes, it could be a different way of engaging in life.”
Original BBC Future article here:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170126-the-untranslatable-emotions-you-never-knew-you-had
Sunday, December 16, 2012
12 Enjoyable Names for Relatively Common Things
1. box tent : the plastic table-like item found in pizza boxes
2. jamais vu : that feeling of seeing something for the first time, even though there’s nothing new about it
3. paresthesia : that tingling sensation when your foot falls asleep
4. grawlix : the string of typographical symbols comic strips use to indicate profanity (“$%@!”)
5. caruncula : the small, triangular pink bump on the inside corner of each eye
6. badinage : another word for playful banter
7. rhumba : a group of rattlesnakes
8. dringle : to waste time by being lazy
9. agraffe : the wire cage that keeps the cork in a bottle of champagne
10. wings : those back flaps on a bra
11. rasher : a single slice of bacon
12. purlicue : the web between your thumb and forefinger
via Mental Floss
2. jamais vu : that feeling of seeing something for the first time, even though there’s nothing new about it
3. paresthesia : that tingling sensation when your foot falls asleep
4. grawlix : the string of typographical symbols comic strips use to indicate profanity (“$%@!”)
5. caruncula : the small, triangular pink bump on the inside corner of each eye
6. badinage : another word for playful banter
7. rhumba : a group of rattlesnakes
8. dringle : to waste time by being lazy
9. agraffe : the wire cage that keeps the cork in a bottle of champagne
10. wings : those back flaps on a bra
11. rasher : a single slice of bacon
12. purlicue : the web between your thumb and forefinger
via Mental Floss
Monday, September 24, 2012
Neologism: "Pants"
The Mysteries of Vernacular series is created by Myriapod Productions.
They are working on a short film for each letter of the alphabet.
http://mysteriesofvernacular.com/
Thursday, December 8, 2011
French Lesson
Pour tous les gens qui ne parlent pas français, votre première leçon commence maintenant.
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