This interview with linguist, Steven Pinker, has some very interesting stuff on language and metaphor, for those of you who may be linguistically inclined.
Ken Carroll
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The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher has a bracing chapter on metaphor.
Very very interesting! I need to read his books…if the way we use our language reflects the way we think and feel, I need a book on the science of Chinese language! Anyone else find it difficult to understand the way Chinese people communicate?! Seriously, I would actually like to find a book on this!
Not interesting at all to me. I like some chatting about learning theories. Steven Kaufmann is great to listen to. He speaks 9 languages, including Mandarin and Cantonese.
He has some interesting stuff about how to learn, and what he thinks is not good learning. His speech is partly in Japanese:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIgjwJck1Ho
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czVLHT-6Vsg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcMLt6eRTVo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v7Bty1yfgE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RF3mt6DMdc
Partly in Mandarin:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmXVN2t2seE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HPjijVoPXM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woqM_sNcm9k
I find his speeches quite motivating. He is also in line with Ken that grammar is not meaningful.
Thanks Fox,
I will now add Steven Kaufmann to my list of heroes which includes Dashan, John Pasden, Serge Melnyk, Ken Carroll and my heroine Jenny Zhu.
I first came across Steve Kaufmanns site a few weeks ago and posted a link to his site on this forum. His ideas on how one should go about learning languages are those of a practical and successful language learner. They are worth checking out.
An interesting article. I wonder if his observation in the last part of the article that “concrete-to-abstract transitions (are) so common in everyday speech and writing” applies to languages other than English as well. How about Chinese, for example?
As for Steven Kaufmann, I can assure you his Japanese is quite fluent — much better than my English. I think just being a language genius is not sufficient for achieving that level of fluency — he also must have spent quite a lot of time learning it.
This Steven Kaufmann sounds very interesting. He is still learning languages at 61 which gives me hope that I can master Mandarin at 51 … and his comments on learning languages agree with my experience …
I have said it before, but Dan Sperber has interesting things to say about language (in particular, intentionality) but he does not write popular stuff.