It's bizarre. Suddenly every piece of linguistic research is spun as a challenge to "universal grammar". The most recent example involves Ewa Dabrowka's interesting work on the linguistic correlates of large educational differences — Quentin Cooper did a segment on BBC 4, a couple of days ago, about how this challenges the whole idea of […]
Here's something for our "Words for X" file, along with some historical fiction and a bit of relevant psychology.
The list of selections for Open Lab 2009 ("a printed annual anthology of science blogging", edited this year by Scicurious) was posted this morning. According to Open Lab's judges, the "50 best science blogging posts of the year" included my post "Betting on the poor boy: Whorf strikes back", 4/5/2009.
The December 17th Economist contains an article entitled "In Search of the World's Hardest Language". Such things usually make me groan, but this one is actually pretty good. At the level of detail one can reasonably expect in such a context, the facts seem to be correct, the range of languages considered is broader than […]
I've observed from time to time, half-seriously, that the ambiguity of plural noun-phrase comparison ("women have better hearing than men") causes — as well as results from — the tendency to interpret small group differences as essential group characteristics (e.g. "The Pirahã and us", 10/6/2007; "Annals of essentialism: sexual orientation and rhetorical assymmetry", 6/18/2008; "Pop […]
Generalization is the essence of rationality. But the ways that human languages encourage us to generalize can cause enormous damage to rational thinking, especially in combination with the natural human preference for clear and simple stories over complicated ones. I've cited many examples involving journalists or popular authors, most recently with respect to the effects […]
Yesterday, those listening to NPR's Morning Edition heard a report by Robert Krulwich ("Shakespeare had roses all wrong") discussing the effects of grammatical gender on word-association norms, as investigated by Lera Boroditsky.
Do the well-demonstrated Whorfian effects in color discrimination really reach down to the level of perception? Some recent research suggests that Whorfian effects may exist at a level that is literally perceptual.
In the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, Billy Baker has an article exploring the cultural significance of the local expression salted, a popular put-down among Boston's schoolkids. Baker explains: Salted is typically delivered by a third party as a way to get into someone else's fight — person one insults person two, and person three informs […]
Responding to the popularity of this morning's post on the politico-lexical economy of fair, here's a list of some earlier LL posts on aspects of the No Word for X meme and its rhetorical deployment [updated for some later ones as well…]: "No word for 'runoff'?", 12/23/2020 "'No words for mental health'", 9/8/2020 "Two few […]
A couple of days ago, I drove up to Los Angeles from my Language Log Plaza basement office in San Diego, for a quick visit with my grad school classmate Ed Keer. Ed lives in Philly (where Mark Liberman's swank executive suite is located), and was in LA on business. I've visited Ed a few […]
According to David Brooks, "Harmony and the Dream", NYT, 8/11/2008: The world can be divided in many ways — rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian — but one of the most striking is the divide between the societies with an individualist mentality and the ones with a collectivist mentality. This is a divide that goes […]