Sin Retoques

[useless-catalanfacts]

Còmplices del genocidi lingüístic

Al costat dels que no fan res, hi tenim els que es lamenten de la situació i diuen que els sap molt greu, però que aposten clarament pel cas

Bon article, curtet i de Núvol que no té paywalls.

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Humans are deeply affected by stories, yet it is unclear how. In this study, we explored two aspects of aesthetic experiences during narrati

[kedidirokedi]

Cave of Forgotten Dreams, 2010, dir. Werner Herzog

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Chauvet grotte

36kya

[thegingerpowers]

[pa-ola123]

💚🍃

[pa-ola123]

💚

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Gurung language aka Manangi, Mustangs, Tamu Kyi, Seke.

Tonal. Postpositions. Split ergativity.

Gurung<Tamangic<Sino-Tibetan.

[homunculus-argument]

I love how both corvids and parrots are in general highly intelligent, but where corvids generally have strict hierarchies, solve disagreements in the pecking order by fighting, and have a strong dislike for anything new or foreign until they figure out how to make use of it, parrots are just here to party.

The New Caledonian crow, who knows how to specifically build a tool in order to build another tool, never engages in play. These motherfuckers are smarter than some people with the right to vote, and they are Extremely Serious Birds. They don't have time to play, they got work to do and kids to raise.

And then there's the kea, straight-up titled "clown of the mountains", that has a specific vocalization for "playtime!". Scientists decided to try what happens if they play the Play Call for two fully-grown adult keas that are together in an area and can clearly see there is no other, third kea to make the call, and they just go "great idea, disembodied voice! it's TIME TO FUCKING PARTY!" and start wrestling.

Imagine working really hard in order to make it into a top university to study astrophysics, making it to your first Very Serious Class, sitting down full of serious determination, and the dude next to you is taking notes without using his hands, with a glitter pen he's shoved up his nose. And his notes are good.

[homunculus-argument]

It's your first day of Bird University and you already fucking hate this guy.

[trixree]

So there's this gene in humans called PLXNC1 or "Plexin", right? So Plexin is associated with increased neuron function and is generally thought to be correlated to human's increased cognitive ability for the use of language, i.e., "language learning". Super cool, right?

Humans aren't the only animals with advanced language learning that have Plexin in their genome. We can actually find homologous plexin between humans and PARROTS!

Using genomic alignment search tools, we can actually break down the sequence of human Plexin and directly compare it to the Plexin found in parrots. (This was actually a project I ran for an upper division genomics class, and running the program literally takes like... ten minutes.) I wanted to see how similar the plexin gene was between humans and parrots, so I queued up the human sequence against all of the available records from parrot genomes and sorted by greatest percent identity (i.e., which bird species had the closest plexin to ours?)

It was this funky dude right here:

THAT'S RIGHT BABY! The kea, notorious for being a straight up motherfucking prank god, carries Plexin with a 79.42% identity comapred to humans'.

THIS LITTLE ASSHOLE HAS A HOMOLOGOUS LANGUAGE LEARNING GENE WITH US!!!! A GENE THAT IS THOUGHT TO BE CORRELATED TO HIGHER LEVEL LEARNING AND INTELLIGENCE!!!!! AND THEY USE THEIR INTELLIGENCE TO WREAK HAVOC ON TOURISTS

Also these guys have been found to literally have predictive reasoning skills, which we consider REALLY FUCKING ADVANCED for a lot of animal species. They pass the Aesop's fable test with flying colors. They're so goddamn cool, I love them so much. The kea really said: "I will use my superior intelligence to have a good fucking time" and that's so powerful honestly

[aprilmolano]

@youreyesblazeout .

Interesting.

Memo to self..befriend a Kea

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Plexin could be important for the cognitive development but, in terms of language, the most decisive thing is the foxp2.

More about : Eric Jarvis, Claudio V Mello.

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A new sister lineage for Homo sapiens – the arrival of ‘Dragon Man’

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Evolutionary study suggests prehistoric human fossils 'hiding in plain sight' in Southeast Asia

Evolutionary study suggests prehistoric human fossils 'hiding in plain sight' in Southeast Asia

The ancestors of modern-day people living on Southeast Asian islands likely interbred with a prehistoric species called Denisovans - raising

So  where are the region’s Denisovans?

[smithsonianlibrariesarchives]

Books aren’t always bound in leather or boring buckram– sometimes they strut their stuff in cloth and silk! This embroidered binding, designed by Yamaka Seiga, adorns a volume of Ayanishiki, a 1925 Japanese work that features facsimile images of ancient textiles. It is one of six volumes celebrating the history of textile manufacture in Kyoto, which has thrived in the area for over 1200 years. In this case, you really can judge a book by its cover! 

Learn more in our catalogue.

[sociolinguo]

‘I’ve Lost My Identity’: On the Mysteries of Foreign Accent Syndrome

What is it that makes individuals suffering from FAS sound like foreign speakers of their native language?

“On September 6, 1941, the German-occupied city of Oslo was attacked by the British Royal Air Force. The frightened citizens caught in the open frantically sought refuge from the falling bombs. One of the casualties of the air raid was a 30-year-old woman named Astrid, who was hit by shrapnel as she ran toward a shelter. She was seriously wounded on the left side of her head. Hospital staff feared she would not survive. After a few days, however, she regained consciousness and was found to have paralysis on the right side of her body. She was also unable to speak.

Over time her paralysis receded, and she gradually recovered her ability to talk. Her speech, however, had changed, and people who heard her detected a pronounced German-like accent. This was a serious problem in Norway, where the military occupation had created intense antipathy toward anything German, and her speech caused shopkeepers to refuse to assist her. Clearly she had no desire to speak as she did. Even more mysteriously, she had never lived outside Norway, nor had she interacted with foreigners.

Two years after her injury, Astrid’s strange case came to the attention of Georg Herman Monrad-Krohn. He was a professor of neurology at the University of Oslo and had a particular interest in language disorders. He was also struck by Astrid’s distinctly foreign accent and initially thought that she must be German or French.

Astrid’s case is not unique: An occurrence of what is now called foreign accent syndrome (FAS) was described as early as 1907 by Pierre Marie in France, where a Parisian had acquired an “Alsatian” accent. Over the next century, physicians and language researchers reported dozens of similar cases. As the case studies piled up in the medical journals, scholars struggled to understand what was going on. (FAS has also happened to at least one well-known person today: In 2011 the British singer George Michael, who grew up in London, came out of a three-week coma and initially spoke with a West Country accent.)”

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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2012.11.010

[paleoart]

Extended Family II Puspa Homo floresiensis Puspa is a sweet girl to whom smiling comes easy, despite the hardships faced by her species. Likes: running through the grass with her eyes closed, the smell of saltwater Dislikes: giant lizards — This is one in a series of portraits featuring different hominids under an intimate and humanizing light. Take these reconstructions with a grain of salt, but ask yourself: how similar to ourselves could our cousins have been? Human model edited from DAZ Studio mesh, flower from Quixel Megascans.

Patreon • Ko-fi • Facebook  • Twitter • Prints & Merch  

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Evolution of Language and Music

Evolution of Language and Music

Welcome to our mini-conference! Here you will find all final blog posts and videos of students in the Evolution of Language and Music at Uni

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Is it possible that Neanderthals had a spiritual life? | The Spectator

.@prosepluspassion

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Sheanderthal | Aeon

What do we know about the lives of Neanderthal women? – Rebecca Wragg Sykes | Aeon Essays

Not all Neanderthals were ‘cavemen’: half were women. What can archaeologists tell us about how they lived?

[heavenlyyshecomes]

“The fall of a language is set in motion when [bilinguals] begin to take more seriously what they read in English. It is set in motion when, for example, they turn to English-language media to learn about critical international events and use the media of their own country only to find out the results of home sports games or follow home celebrity gossip. It’s set in motion when bilinguals hurry to order a heavyweight English-language book attracting media attention before it comes out in translation, while neglecting fine books written in their own language. (Watching American or British television dramas rather than their own is not unconnected to this process.) Finally, because they have gradually become accustomed to making light of what is written in their own language, bilinguals start taking their own country’s literature less seriously than literature written in English—especially the classics of English literature, which are evolving into the universal canon. A vicious cycle then begins. The more palpable this trend becomes, the more non-English writers would feel that writing in their own language will not reach the readers they are aiming for. […] Through the process of negative selection, writers who continue writing in their own language would be those whose books do not deserve to be called texts. This cycle, once it began, could only gain in force. Not only bilinguals but true readers of literature—not mere consumers of books—would eventually cease to expect their own language to bear the intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic burdens it once did.”

—Minae Mizumura,The Fall of Language in the Age of English, tr. Julia Winters Carpenter & Mari Yoshihara

[sociolinguo]

People on Vanuatu's Malekula Island speak more than 30 Indigenous languages. Here's why we must record them

Indigenous languages around the world are declining at a rapid rate, but linguists can help language revival by working with communities of native speakers.

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Distinguishing syntactic operations in the brain: Dependency and phrase-structure parsing

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