As a mom of a 4-year-old and 8-year-old, I frequently find myself using the phrase, “Use your words.” The other day, my youngest wanted something on a high-up shelf and was pointing to it. I looked up and there were only like a gazillion possibilities. So I said, “use your words.” At his age, his words are imprecise. Last night could mean the night prior … Continue reading Use Your Words
The other night my brother, Jay, and I were out to dinner with his wife and another friend. Jay and I were sitting next to each other and my friend said it was funny to watch us with our synchronized big smiles, expressiveness, and gesticulating. We were talking about writing, something neither of us do professionally. My brother is a marketing guru and I’m an … Continue reading Is Being A Writer an Inherited Trait?
A verbal tantrum on our irritating misuse of words. Continue reading Old Man Rant Episode #9: Words, Words Words!
Hi everyone! I will do another language post, on a request long ago by Troy Headrick. Thanks Troy! I will talk about the relation between language and culture, which necessarily includes individual minds because culture happens when individual minds get together. This will be a bit longer but bear with meJ I will start with the best–known and maybe the most controversial hypothesis about language … Continue reading Language and Mind/Culture
Hey there! Let’s get back to some language talk today. Let’s talk about language families. So, first, what is a language family? It is a group of languages that are derived from the same ancestor (proto) language. So, the mother language for all Indo-European languages is Proto-Indo-European, for example. We get languages families by building cognates (comparison of basic vocabulary) and assessing similarities. So, for … Continue reading Language Families
If you think about a particular emotion, how many words can you use to express it? How many words do you know to express a different side of an emotion? There are more than you might think. I recently stumbled across a list of feelings with the associated words, and the list is BIG! For example, according to this list, happiness can be … Continue reading The Language of Emotions
Provided by Betul Erbasi from betulerbasi.com Hey, it is me, Betul (betulerbasi.com)! I am here again to talk about something about languages. This time, let’s talk about language change! Let’s start this time with a guessing game this time. Guess which word the following pronunciation forms stand for (this is called phonetic transcription and we use brackets for it). If you get 8 out of … Continue reading A Language Constant: Change
Provided by Betul Erbasi from betulerbasi.com How are you? English Wie geht es dir? German Nasılsın? Turkish كيف حالك Arabic 你好嗎? Mandarin お元気ですか？ Japanese The phrases in the set above mean the same thing in different languages. They look fairly different, right? I would not think that these languages could share anything at all. Well, hint hint, some people disagree. On top of that, take … Continue reading UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR, SAY WHAT?!
