Travel, Language, Food and whatever else I can fit

I think the world is coming to a collective of ideas as weve been in the information age now for awhile. The tempo has been set for thousands of years, but now a days were racing forwards with exponential human growth in our thought processes and transfer of information. Here are my stories: (ding ding - Law and Order bell)

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Genius, a well kept secret?

Our minds are constantly living in an analysis of the culmination of our past actions. If you focus on the here and now, you will be using all that energy in a new way, to create, instead of analyze. Thats where genius lies.

[drummerjacob-blog]

It is one of the commonest of mistakes to consider that the limit of our power of perception is also the limit of all there is to perceive." - Charles Webster Leadbeater

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Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations." - Henry David Thoreau

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I sit and think with a drink about how im gonna win.

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Speed Reading/the Amazing Human Brain/Languages: random observations

"If you can raed tihs, yuo hvae an aimzang mnid too. Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can. I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed erveylteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!"

While cute and funny, this paragraph actually proves a big point:  that speed reading is actually possible for humans because we look at words as pictures and not as individual letters. 

Now that I think about it, we also think/speak that way too.  When I was living in a foreign country (the Philippines) and I had to adapt to the local language which is Tagalog or Filipino.  I quickly realized how much we rely on just the overall sound of a word, rather than the individual syllable enunciations.  For example, we can say something like "Ey-o-no" and its understood to someone native to the English language as "I dont know."  Another example would be "'snodivenwhadysed" - "Its not even what I said."  

If said in the right way, its very understandable to a native speaker. 

Well, when I was learning this new language, I found it impossible to understand people because I was reading the words in books and then listening to people speak it.

The reason for why some words said so poorly can still be understood, I believe, is because we've heard those words in that order said many times so we can hear a verbal "image" just like with the reading part at the top.

Because of this phenomenon, we put less emphasis on enunciating them clearly, which is the opposite of a foreigner tahts (oops, oh well you can still understand right ;) learning the language, and you can normally tell if someone is not native by the way they oversay their words because they are still practicing the mouth movements/muscle work of saying the words or they are just a proper type of speaker.

Anyway, I am fascinated with the way humans with their overall similar makeup, interact with completely different languages that really work different parts of the mind by vocabulary words in the language, and the muscles of the face used in different languages, as well as the meaning of the words. 

Some words in many languages simply cant be translated to others because the word may not exist.  The collective people of one historical area/country may not have a word (which was originally just an idea that needed to be communicated) for something that another group did so therefore, no communication could be made.

Here are a few interesting examples:  In the Philippines for example, rice is a staple food and people eat it with every meal, 3 times a day, so they need to communicate about rice more often than someone living in the Sahara desert or in Antarctica.  Hence, there are 7 words to describe rice in the Philippines:

palay - unmilled rice

bigas - milled rice

kanin - cooked rice

lugaw - rice porridge

tutong - burned rice

bahaw - left over rice

sinangag - fried rice

So in English if I want to say, do we have any bahaw, id have to say "left over rice."  And not to be too picky, but id rather say 1 word for something than 3 anyday. 

One last example id like to share before I finish would be the word 'snow' in the Inuit language which is spoken by about 13-15,000 Inuits in the southwest Alaska region.

One quick note before I share the list.  The list shown is actually a list of 'lexemes' which are not words but are kind of like roots of words.  So the word 'speak' brings us to infleced forms like speaks, spoke, spake, and spoken.  The reason we want to call these 'lexemes' and not words, is because of the way the language is made up; you will have thousands of words in the Inuit language of "Yupik" for snow but we just want the root meaning of it.

          A (Snow particles)

1: Snowflake

qanuk  (snowflake) qanir   (to snow) qanunge (to snow) NUN qanugglir (to snow) NUN

2: Frost kaneq (frost) kaner (be frosty)

3: Fine snow kanevvluk (fine snow/rain particles) kanevcir (to get fine snow/rain particles)

4: Drifting particles natquik (drifting snow) natqu(v)igte (for snow to drift along the ground)

5: Clinging particles nevluk (clinging debris) nevlugte (to have clinging debris)

          B: )Fallen snow)

6: Fallen snow on the ground aniu  (snow on ground) aniu (get snow on ground) apun (snow on ground) qanikcaq (snow on ground) qanikcir  (get snow on ground)

7: Soft, deep fallen snow on the ground: muruaneq (soft deep snow)

8: Crust on fallen snow qetrar - (for snow to crust) qerretrar - (for snow to crust)

9: Fresh fallen snow on the ground nutaryuk (fresh snow)

10: Fallen snow floating on water: qanisqineq (snow floating on water)

          C. Snow formations

11: Snow bank qengaruk (snow bank)

12: Snow block utvak (snow carved in block)

13: Snow cornice navcaq (snow cornice, snow formation about to collapse) navcite- (get caught in an avalanche)

D. Meterological events

14: Blizzard or snowstorm pirta (blizzard or snowstorm) pircir (to blizzard) pirtuk (blizzard or snowstorm)

15: Severe blizzard cellallir   cellarrlir- (to snow heavily) piretepag (to blizzard severely) pirrelvag (to blizzard severely)

OK so that was sort of long.  I just wanted to show the many different words they that use instead of just saying snow storm, theres a whole new idea for that one event.  It makes you react differently with the world around you. 

Now before I go too far with this, I would encourage everyone to look up the phenomenon of the Aborignies in Australia.  Ill give you a search hint for some interesting articles; the Aboriginies dont have a word for Left or Right like us city going folk do, they simply use the translated form of North, South, East and West.  It is all in relation to the sun as opposed to city/streets/building relationships with Left and Right that works very well in a city and with lots of established landmarks but in the flat lands of central Australia, turning left in a 5,000sqm flat land wont do you much good.  :)

I wonder if we'll use English or some other language like Spanish or Chinese to one day have a world language that we all understand, at least as a second tongue.  That would be interesting...but for now im stuck learning as many languages as I can to try to understand the interesting people of this world.

Thanks for reading my first real blog ever, and day/night.