Archive for February, 2008
Thursday music
Ani again.
Who says?
An interesting post over at Language Log discusses how, apparently, native speakers of French, intended to serve as a control group in a second-language acquisition experiment, were remarkably inconsistent in the genders they assigned to nouns. This is important because native speakers are generally assumed to be fairly consistent and correct in their use of […]
Token human
Tell me if this sounds familiar: you hear of something awful/upsetting/annoying/stupid happening in a foreign country or a community that’s been in the news a lot. You, in your wonderfully informed and astute way, watched an ABC special or read an article about this culture/community in the Economist, both of which are respected institutions. You […]
Thursday music
Tracy Chapman singing about a revolution. This is live - just her and her guitar and what looks like hundreds of people.
Language habits
Scientific American interviews Alice Gaby, a linguist working at UC Berkeley (and a University of Melbourne alumna), about her research on how language affects our perception of the world. She explains, however, that language isn’t some sort of “straitjacket” that limits us to thinking in only one way, but rather a “habit” of mind that […]
Thursday music
Time for a little Joan Jett.
Benazir Bhutto’s book, women, Islam, Pakistan, etc.
The Australian published an excerpt from Benazir Bhutto’s book yesterday in which she speaks of starting college in the US in 1969, where she experienced firsthand the rights and freedoms that Americans took for granted. She also arrived at a time when feminism was finally gaining some ground in the US. What struck me though, […]
Multilingual poetry!
I found this bit of gorgeousness via languagehat, a blog I’ve only just started reading.
Antoine Cassar writes in five different languages, but rather than write one poem in one language, he has attempted to “braid” all five together into single poems, called Muzajik or Mosaics. The results are intriguing. The first and third link will […]It’s official
I’m enrolled in the PhD program. Till 2012. And I’m being paid to do it, which is utterly cool.
There were delays, of course - it’s taken almost a month and a half to process everything. You’d think, with an unconditional offer and two full scholarships, there’d be no reason for any holdups, wouldn’t you? I […]Thursday music
Hey, it’s still Thursday in some parts of the world.
The Cat Empire - I’ve been hearing of them for a while but never listened to any of their stuff till this week. I like.