Ruminations, Crustaceans, and γ-Radiations

Earthenware funerary sculpture in the form of a dog, China, Sichuan Province, Eastern Han Dynasty, 25-220 AD

Foodlife - forested food hall in the Water Tower Place Mall - Chicago, IL (1993)

Designed by Marve Cooper Design & Dorf Associates, Foodlife was part of the Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises group of restaurants/food courts, and was one of the first in the new wave of food halls that would take off in earnest in the 2000s & 2010s.

Black cat and woman's leg - Harald Sallberg , 1951 .

Swedish , 1895-1963

abandoned thermal power plant | Hungary

I mean can you imagine. singing about how somebody broke your heart and they’re literally harmonizing. they’re right fucking there. they’re in touching distance. insanity! complete insanity! I would either break down crying or fully snap and break their neck

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dGykwC0fdJ4

An interesting linguistic typology study finding that sound symbolism is more common than we’d assumed. Excerpt from a good summary of the study in the Washington Post: 

If you visited Iceland and asked someone what they called the smelling organ in the middle of their face, they’d tell you, nev. In Japan, it’s hana. To Sar speakers in southern Chad it’s kon, and among the Zuni tribe of the southwestern United States. it’s noli. In fact, you could go to more than 1,400 places around the world, question speakers of more than 1,400 different languages, and hear 1,400 words that contain the sound “n.” But all of them mean the same thing: nose.

That’s one of the findings of a sweeping study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Monday, which found evidence of strong associations between the sounds in words and the ideas they represent in completely unrelated languages from all corners of the world. Despite a long-standing assumption in linguistics that the sounds we pick to signify certain concepts are arbitrary, the researchers argue that at least some associations are more universal than you’d think. …

A series of studies starting in 1929 have documented what’s called the “bouba/kiki” effect: People from societies across the world almost universally associate round shapes with the made-up word “bouba” and spiky shapes with the non-word “kiki.” …

Christiansen’s work pushes sound symbolism back to the forefront. He and his team, which included statisticians, neuroscientists, physicists and computer scientists, examined the words for 100 concepts in more than 6,000 languages in search of commonalities. They weren’t looking for universal rules — just examples of associations that popped more often than you’d expect due to pure chance. … To eliminate the influence of geographic relationships, shared sounds would only be considered symbolic if they appeared in languages from at least three of the world’s six large and relatively isolated areas: North America, South America, Eurasia, Africa, Papua New Guinea and the Pacific islands, and Australia. … 

For a few of Christiansen’s concepts, the explanation appears straightforward. The “n” in nose (andnev and hana and kon and noli) is nasal, requiring that we speak through the very organ we’re trying to describe. Things that are small make high-pitched, squeaking sounds, just like the “i” in tiny, sagheer (Arabic) and liten (Norwegian). For other associations, the link between signal and signified is more opaque.

This doesn’t mean that Saussure was completely wrong about arbitrariness. Though words like nose may share some commonalities, most of the terms in the average adult’s 80,000-word vocabulary represent abstract concepts that aren’t easily represented with concrete sounds. When words for the same concept do resemble each other, it is usually a sign that they share an etymological root.

Read the whole article. 

Here’s the academic paper, Sound–meaning association biases evidenced across thousands of languages by Damián E. Blasi, Søren Wichmann, Harald Hammarström, Peter F. Stadler, and Morten H. Christiansen. 

Fast forward twenty years to when the father of the biology professor who told me this is driving out from the east coast to see his son in California. Crossing the southwest at night.

An armadillo runs across the road. 

He comes to a screeching halt and the Thing Of Evil, which he never knew was actually a real animal, trots the rest of the way across the road and vanishes into the desert.

People who are blind from birth will gesture when they speak. I always like pointing out this fact when I teach classes on gesture, because it gives us an an interesting perspective on how we learn and use gestures. Until now I’ve mostly cited a 1998 paper from Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow that analysed the gestures and speech of young blind people. Not only do blind people gesture, but the frequency and types of gestures they use does not appear to differ greatly from how sighted people gesture. If people learn gesture without ever seeing a gesture (and, most likely, never being shown), then there must be something about learning a language that means you get gestures as a bonus.

Blind people will even gesture when talking to other blind people, and sighted people will gesture when speaking on the phone - so we know that people don’t only gesture when they speak to someone who can see their gestures.

Earlier this year a new paper came out that adds to this story. Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow looked at the gestures of blind speakers of Turkish and English, to see if the *way* they gestured was different to sighted speakers of those languages. Some of the sighted speakers were blindfolded and others left able to see their conversation partner.

Turkish and English were chosen, because it has already been established that speakers of those languages consistently gesture differently when talking about videos of items moving. English speakers will be more likely to show the manner (e.g. ‘rolling’ or bouncing’) and trajectory (e.g. ‘left to right’, ‘downwards’) together in one gesture, and Turkish speakers will show these features as two separate gestures. This reflects the fact that English ‘roll down’ is one verbal clause, while in Turkish the equivalent would be yuvarlanarak iniyor, which translates as two verbs ‘rolling descending’.

Since we know that blind people do gesture, Özçalışkan’s team wanted to figure out if they gestured like other speakers of their language. Did the blind Turkish speakers separate the manner and trajectory of their gestures like their verbs? Did English speakers combine them? Of course, the standard methodology of showing videos wouldn’t work with blind participants, so the researchers built three dimensional models of events for people to feel before they discussed them.

The results showed that blind Turkish speakers gesture like their sighted counterparts, and the same for English speakers. All Turkish speakers gestured significantly differently from all English speakers, regardless of sightedness. This means that these particular gestural patterns are something that’s deeply linked to the grammatical properties of a language, and not something that we learn from looking at other speakers.

References

Jana M. Iverson & Susan Goldin-Meadow. 1998. Why people gesture when they speak. Nature, 396(6708), 228-228.

Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow. 2016. Is Seeing Gesture Necessary to Gesture Like a Native Speaker? Psychological Science 27(5) 737–747.

Trying to post more stuff here.

The Luteces were the best part of Bioshock Infinite for me, no contest. And since there are several stylized promo covers but not a single one of them features these glorious bastards, I decided to make one myself.

Yesterday’s trip to the library cheered me immensely. Amongst much book-mucking I was able to confirm that, according to the Lexikon der ägyptischen Götter und Götterbezeichnungen, there is one known instance of Set depicted with the head of an ibis or a flamingo, possibly held by Horus on the end of a rope (”der von Horus an einem Strick (?) festgehalten wird”).

Alas, more details (like for example where?? and is there a picture???) will have to wait until my next trip to the National Library of Australia, but in case anybody wants to follow up the reference, it’s something by Erik Hornung in Symbolon: Jahrbuch für Symbolforschung, Neue Folge, Bd 2, Köln 1974, pp 2-16.