Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Have you met this man?

Trust the guy with thirty letters in his name to dig out the most interesting material on anthropology/history/culture. His latest post points to this article in the New Yorker, about Dan Everett, a linguistics professor at Illinois State University.

Everett is well known for his study of the language of the Pirahã, a tribe in Brazil, but better known for his theory that questions the universality of the phenomenon of 'recursion' in language (a theory associated with Noam Chomsky). He postulated, on basis of the tribe's culture and language that (1) the lack of complex thought in the Pirahã mind "extends its tentacles" to language, and (2) thus, causes the Pirahã language to lack recursive elements (therefore denying the Chomsky hypothesis).

Whether true or false, it makes for some fascinating reading. All eyes:

(Everett) hypothesized that the tribe embodies a living-in-the-present ethos so powerful that it has affected every aspect of the people’s lives. Committed to an existence in which only observable experience is real, the Pirahã do not think, or speak, in abstractions—and thus do not use color terms, quantifiers, numbers, or myths.

Everett pointed to the word word 'xibipío' as a clue to how the Pirahã perceive reality solely according to what exists within the boundaries of their direct experience—which Everett defined as anything that they can see and hear, or that someone living has seen and heard. “When someone walks around a bend in the river, the Pirahã say that the person has not simply gone away but 'xibipío'—‘gone out of experience,’ ” Everett said. “They use the same phrase when a candle flame flickers. The light ‘goes in and out of experience.’

..the Pirahã’s unswerving dedication to empirical reality explained their resistance to Christianity, since the Pirahã had always reacted to stories about Christ by asking, “Have you met this man?”

I wish more people were as smart.

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On the subject of recursion, I seem to have a propensity for encountering recursive situations in my dreams. For example, opening a closet door to find another closet inside, and such. Talk of recursion also leads me to think of the associated phenomenon of fractals, the existence of which in cauliflower I discovered whilst dismantling one for dinner, thanks in no small measure to my cooking companion JD.

***

Google has a self-serving joke on recursion. Search for "recursion" and see.

***

Now on the subject of universal grammer: In Zhongwen (Mandarin), the one aspect that intrigues me more than the language itself is the similarity in syntax with other languages. While the similarity of the basic sentence structure with English (i.e., Subject > Verb > Object) is better known, the similarity with more obscure sentence structures in Indian languages is what is more interesting. For instance, the statement "他 什么 也 不 喝" ("He doesn't drink anything" ) has no literal parallel in English - the literal translation "He what also not drinks" makes no sense. However, when translated literally, word for word, to Hindi - "वह कुछ भी नहीं पीता", it makes perfect sense! Same with Gujarati - "એ કઈ પણ નથી પીતો" , Mewadi - "वो कई भी नी पीतो ", and undoubtedly a host of other languages. Chomsky would agree.

Update: Another linguistically fascinating phenomenon is what I call "hitch-hiking" - applying convention from your native language to a foreign one. For instance, as a speaker of Indian-English I often use the statement "Where do I have the time?!" as an emphatic expression of the lack of time (or some other commodity). This way of speaking is, although not unheard of, not terribly popular with British- and American-English speakers; it is adopted directly from an expression common in Indian languages, e.g., "वेळ कुठे आहे?!" or "वक़्त कहाँ है?!". Needless to say, a similar sentence pattern does exist in Zhongwen, "我哪 有 时间!".

Which makes me speculate that a language pedagogy based on existing knowledge of one language (e..g., English) is rather sub-optimal for bi- or multi-linguists as it underutilizes the pre-existing comfort with language patterns and tools that may not exist in the language of instruction. As I write this, I recount spending a lot of time during my Zhongwen education "cheating"; i.e., trying to concoct ways to apply phonetics and syntax from the non-English languages I am familiar with to Zhongwen, often successfully. Theoretically, the more linguistic backgrounds you can leverage towards the learning of a new language, the easier it should be. Now I am thinking business: imagine a line of books "Zhongwen in 7 Days for Bengali Speakers", "...Bengali and English Speakers", "...Bengali, English and Oriya Speakers", and so on.

Sunday, February 21, 2010

More about the tea party

Gene Healy echoes the message of a previous post on the Tea Party movement in this op-ed in the Washington Examiner. Healy argues that to prove its authenticity as a non-partisan group, the Tea Party movement needs to also back cuts in defense spending. They are currently seen as, and act like, hawks. Says he:
We're spending ourselves into bankruptcy to maintain America's Globocop role...and to pursue the profoundly unconservative project of trying to socially engineer failed societies like Afghanistan into modernity.
"Profoundly unconservative"....lol. Good stuff.

Saturday, February 20, 2010

An undignified death?

British TV presenter Ray Gosling confessed on TV earlier last week that he helped a terminally ill lover of his end the suffering by smothering him to death. The confession followed a documentary about mortality and end of life decisions on BBC East Midland's Inside Out which Gosling presented. During the documentary, he interviewed a number of people on the subject and felt motivated to contribute his own experience on the matter.



(Unfortunately, the entire documentary is not available on the BBC website.)

Needless to say, the confession stirred a hornets' nest resulting in heated moral discussions and legal action. Nottingham police arrested and questioned Gosling, later releasing him on bail. Here is what the "suspect" had to say in a TV interview following the controversial broadcast.



Another interview here.

I don't intend to make a hero out of Ray Gosling; for all we know it might have been murder - an act conducted without the friend's consent; nonetheless, it does not change the fact that there are few places in the world where a suffering man or woman can choose to go without resorting to covert pacts or criminal acts.

Newspaper commentator Donald MacLeod argues in this piece that suffocating someone with a pillow is not a dignified death. That's an absurd argument. Till every person does not have control over when to end her own life, deaths of this nature will be undignified regardless of whether they are administered via a stealthy overdose of morphine or a pillow over one's face.

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More on death: 1, 2

Monday, February 15, 2010

A river runs through it (too)

I have used this title for a post before, but who can resist the allure of a great (plagiarized) one? Inspiration: this.

National Public Radio carried this interesting story today about the Mekong River on All Things Considered. Michael Sullivan travels the river and talks of the people living along it; he begins in the Tibetan plateau, where today's piece is from. Upcoming are his dispatches from places downstream - Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Listen to it here. I suppose the following related stories will be available over the next few weeks.

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Whose party is it?

Imagine yourself as being keenly involved with a charitable activity that you strongly believe in , say, sponsoring college education for underprivileged high-school students in your town. You put your time and money behind it, talk your friends into supporting it too, and are generally seen as a champion for the cause.

Then, one day, it suddenly comes to light that all the kids your sponsored were actually from rich families who just milked their scholarships to support their crack addictions. Imagine the emotions you would be overwhelmed with - betrayal at the hands of your benefactees, shame at your own judgment, and a general feeling of wtfness at the situation.

All that went through my mind, when I discovered that the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, Tennessee, intended to invite Sarah Palin to be the keynote speaker. It kept getting worse as the national media descended on Nashville, implicitly equating the Tea Party movement for everything that Palin stood for, and culminated with her well-delivered (but obnoxious nonetheless) speech.

So, you might ask, what is so pissy about Sarah Palin at the Tea Party Convention? Isn't conservativeness, Republicanism, the Tea Party movement, and Sarah Palin all the same thing? To answer that, a some background is in order:

The so-called Tea Party movement started in 2009, right after the election of Barrack Obama. The objective of the movement was, essentially, to oppose socialism and the sudden expansion of government power that the Obama administration was expected to usher in. The movement vehemently opposes taxes, which is where it gets its name from (i.e., the protests against taxes leading to the Boston Tea Party). The movement was, and remains, organic in its institutional structure without central organization of any kind.

I always found the timing of this spawning a bit odd; the Bush era was one of immense growth in the federal government's powers and the national debt - where were the protests then? Liberal commentators were quick to point this out, and they also insinuated that the prime mover for the movement was the president's race. All that notwithstanding, I must admit to having being excited by the very fact a small-government movement of this scale existed.

Tracking the evolution of the movement has been a bittersweet experience. By virtue of the movement being headless and rudderless, it seems everyone right of center has jumped on it and claims it their own. The most vocal and moneyed subset of the bandwagon is that of the fiscally and socially conservative neocons, the group that Sarah Palin represents.

This is unfortunate; I don't believe neocons are true small-government conservatives...they are anti-tax, but not against the evils that taxes lead to. For example, in her speech, Palin advocated lesser taxes, smaller government and continuing a stepped-up war effort in Afghanistan. What kind of math makes it possible to tax less and conduct expensive nation-building on the other side of the globe at the same time?!

After the Nashville tamasha, I was seriously considering if this should be the last straw that marked my disengagement from the Tea Party movement. However, after reading a few other opinions here and there from other small-government advocates who were also disillusioned with Nashville, it occurred to me that withdrawing would mean giving it away to "them". So I stay...with the neocons, with the war-mongers, with the racists...I stay.

As the Sacramento Bee said:
"It wasn't Sarah Palin's party."

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Love via spam

From my inbox...















Couldn't resist posting it.

While on the subject, check out Spamusement. The artist has been dormant for a couple of years now, but the old posts are still funny.

Wednesday, February 03, 2010

Freedom is a double-edged sword

Pope Benedict has infuriated gay supporters in the UK by talking out against the proposed Equality Bill, under debate in the UK legislature. The clergy fears that the bill will force churches to certify homosexual marriages.

The pope argued that the bill is against religious freedom and I am with him. The church is a private institution and the government really has no right to dictate who the church should or should not marry. Of course, the last statement is a completely theoretical one - sadly, governments already interfere intimately with the daily lives of private people and private institutions.

However, there is no better time than this to re-advocate the only solution I see to the gay marriage fight. "Marriage" has traditionally been an institution of which the initiation and termination has been largely overseen by religious institutions. In the spirit of separation of religious and state, the state should withdraw completely from the recognition of marriages.

For matters of legal convenience (i.e., inheritance, debt liabilities, child support), the state should recognize marriages/civil unions simply as "domestic partnerships". That way, the pope will also get his way - if the government doesn't preferentially recognize the unions that his institution sanctifies, it will also have no say in how it does it.

******

In the same spirit as the above argument, I also think it preposterous that governments should prohibit polygamy. If several people wish to be consensually bound in a domestic partnership, more power to them!

******

I first heard the pope story fleetingly on the radio, so naturally when I was online I hopped on Google News to get more details. Guess what my search keywords were. Link wink.
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