#john colapinto

[proceduralbob]

Mom and Dad wanted this to work so I’d be happy. That’s every parent’s dream for their child. But I couldn’t be happy for my parents. I had to be happy for me. You can’t be something that you’re not. You have to be you.

David Reimer, as quoted in As Nature Made Him by John Colapinto

[mentallyrecovering]

Before birth all humans are aquatic animals

[mentallyrecovering]

Dyslexia is a problem of hearing and not reading! The brain can’t differentiate between sounds like Ba Ca or Pa and therefore when it comes to reading the brain has no idea how to pronounce words because it literally doesn’t know what those sounds are

Interesting facts in This Is The Voice by John Colapinto

[bigtickhk]

Get to Know Your Larynx. Then Make Some Noise.

John Colapinto’s “This Is the Voice” explores our vocal cords, why we have them and what humans have gained from our dexterity at making different sounds.

This Is the Voice by John Colapinto

US: https://amzn.to/3rUdpLA 

UK: https://amzn.to/3tRlQZP

https://bookshop.org/a/17891/9781982128746

[heliopheia]

“She was slouched at the table, still in her pathetically crumpled clothes from the day before, her hands around a mug of coffee. Even such a night as she had spent could not mar her beauty. Lips pale, dark hair tumbling in a tangled, pyramidal mass around her shoulders, lower eyelids shadowed with smudged mascara, she looked maddeningly, and quite unintentionally, desirable: a soiled Klimt decadent, a debauched flower girl, Eve after the expulsion.”

-  John Colapinto, About the Author

[internetloot]

The key to learning the language is the tribe’s singing, Keren said: the way that the group can drop consonants and vowels altogether and communicate purely by variations in pitch, stress, and rhythm—what linguists call “prosody.” I was reminded of an evening in the village when I had heard someone singing a clutch of haunting notes on a rising, then falling scale. The voice repeated the pattern over and over, without variation, for more than half an hour. I crept up to the edge of one of the Pirahã huts and saw that it was a woman, winding raw cotton onto a spool, and intoning this extraordinary series of notes that sounded like a muted horn. A toddler played at her feet. I asked Everett about this, and he said something vague about how tribe members “sing their dreams.” But when I described the scene to Keren she grew animated and explained that this is how the Pirahã teach their children to speak. The toddler was absorbing the lesson in prosody through endless repetition—an example, one might argue, of Edward Sapir’s cultural theory of language acquisition at work.

John Colapinto, The New Yorker

[readinginthemidwest]

John Colapinto. As Nature Made Him: The boy who was raised a girl. New York: Harper Collins, 2000. 

Read 7/15

[mirrorontheworld]

The Interpreter

Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language?