[TED] Deb Roy: The birth of a word

MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language — so he wired up his house with videocameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son’s life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch “gaaaa” slowly turn into “water.” Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn.

Lengua Indio

Back in 2005, fellow Austronesian ethnolinguist Chris Sundita reported the availability online of several important Filipino historical documents.

Many of the documents are books from the Spanish colonial era which were used by Spaniards who wished to know Tagalog, Cebuano, Kapampangan, and whatever else. The books are written in Spanish, English, Dutch, German, and French.

They’re available from the University of Michigan under the theme The United States and its Territories: 1870-1925.

The site has proved useful in some debates with concerning the revision of the Tagalog alphabet, as well as the supposedly insulting origins of the word Pinoy - which there aren’t any.

The collection remains extremely impressive. However, it also helps knowing Spanish.

A small sample of what they have:

Tagalog - Vocabulario de la lengua tagala compuesto por varios religiosos doctos y graves

Bikol - Vocabulario de la lengua Bicol

Pangasinan - Diccionario pangasinan-español

Kapampangan - Arte de la lengua Pampanga

Ibanag - Agguiammuan tac cagui gasila ó gramática ibanag-castellana

Akeanon - Publications in Aklan dialect

Cebuano - Gramática bisaya para facilitar el estudio del dialecto bisaya cebuano

Waray-Waray - Diccionario español-bisaya para las provincias de Sámar y Leyte

Ilokano - Estudio del idioma Ilocano ante el Tagalo y el Bisayo

The Music of the Spoken Word

Sound is the emotional glue that holds individuals together. Neuroscientist Jamshed Bharucha explains the importance of verbal communication by discussing the unconscious choices people tend to make when expressing different emotions. Across language, age, and even species, it is possible to speak and hear emotion on an instinctual level.

TED talk. How babies learn language. They’re even smarter than we thought they were

I, Austronesian.

Infographic via Tagalog and Kapampangan-speaking French geographer JC Gaillard

If a restaurant puts on the menu, ‘These are our most popular items’, then those items immediately become 17-20 more popular. It’s not social pressure, it’s social proof.

Robert Cialdini, in an interview with Michael Price, American Psychological Association

Midgets and giants

The Economist:

Jan Pen, a Dutch economist who died last year, came up with a striking way to picture inequality. Imagine people’s height being proportional to their income, so that someone with an average income is of average height. Now imagine that the entire adult population of America is walking past you in a single hour, in ascending order of income.

The first passers-by, the owners of loss-making businesses, are invisible: their heads are below ground. Then come the jobless and the working poor, who are midgets. After half an hour the strollers are still only waist-high, since America’s median income is only half the mean. It takes nearly 45 minutes before normal-sized people appear. But then, in the final minutes, giants thunder by. With six minutes to go they are 12 feet tall. When the 400 highest earners walk by, right at the end, each is more than two miles tall.

An economy of midgets (asourceofinspiration.com)
The rise and rise of the cognitive elite (economist.com)

Stefan Sagmeister on Sustaining Creativity /via @brainpicker

“The worst of this sorry bunch of semi-educated losers are those who seem to glory in being irritated by nouns becoming verbs. How dense and deaf to language development do you have to be? If you don’t like nouns becoming verbs, then for heaven’s sake avoid Shakespeare who made a doing-word out of a thing-word every chance he got. He TABLED the motion and CHAIRED the meeting in which nouns were made verbs.”

- A prescriptivist Stephen Fry in his essay, Don’t Mind Your Language…