Futurismic

“To have another language is to possess a second soul,” Charlemagne supposedly said, possibly in a Germanic dialect of the Franks. That certainly implies another personality, which is what researchers in the Journal of Consumer Research report observing in a study of bicultural, bilingual women.

…[W]omen classified themselves as more assertive when they spoke Spanish than when they spoke English. They also had significantly different perceptions of women in ads when the ads were in Spanish versus English. “In the Spanish-language sessions, informants perceived females as more self-sufficient and extroverted,” write the authors.

The researchers say the shift, which seems to occur unconsciously, could have implications for political and purchasing choices. Not to mention an interesting side-effect to a shrinking world.

[Image: jetheriot]

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Ooh, this combines two of my favorite things:  languages and the future.  John Scalzi’s grammar bitch of the day (granted, that day was a while ago) touches on one of those small spelling differences, specifically ‘alright’ vs ‘all right’.  While I disagree with Mr. Scalzi on this point (’alright’ is  usable as that Lichtenstein art he has up, though I’d ask somebody “Are you all right?”), it’s something to think about when discussing the differences between English spellings.  I’ve spent all day today trying to explain to Japanese eight-year-olds why I say “zee” and my co-worker says “zed.”

Garance wonders if the proliferation of an unedited Internet might not bring about a return to the writings of previous centuries, when men wore hose and words were spelled phonetically:

As blogs move us into a less heavily copy-edited world, I sometimes wonder if we’re moving back into a more 16th and 17th century form of writing, where the idea of correct spelling was less important than the communication of meaning — which, in reality, can be accomplished just as well with incorrectly spelled words and homonyms as with a more perfect language. And also: as we move ever deeper into this new world of speech-like writing, will the perfect, formal language of the page one day seem as antique and elaborate as Victorian silverware?

What say you all?  I’m a stickler for spelling and grammar (though I muck it up a fair bit), but I can definitely see a return to a more homonymic age. (funny, lowercase ‘internet’ doesn’t pass my spellchecker, but ‘homonymic’ does just fine)

(image from lolcats, of course)

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Star Trek’s various starship crews seldom have any trouble talking to aliens, thanks to a nifty device known as a “universal translator.” Although the universal translator was invented, like the transporter, simply because it was the only practical way to tell a story originally sold as “Wagon Train to the stars,” it might actually be possible to build one. (Via KurzweilAI.net.)

So says Terrence Deacon of the University of California, Berkeley, US, who argues that no matter how alien a species might be, its language–even if it communicates via, say, scent–must still describe real objects in the real world, which means there must be an underlying universal code that, given enough knowledge about language and sufficient computing power, could be deciphered.

Deacon presented his idea on April 17 at the 2008 Astrobiology Science Conference in Santa Clara, California.

New Scientist notes:

Testing the theory might be tough because we would have to make contact with aliens advanced enough to engage in abstract thinking and the use of linguistic symbols. But Denise Herzing of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, US, points out that we might be able to test it by studying dolphins.

“Our work suggests that dolphins may be able to communicate using symbols,” Herzing told New Scientist. “The word’s not definitively in yet, but it’s totally possible that we might show universality by understanding dolphin language.”

New Scientist compares the proposed device to Douglas Adams’s “babelfish,” a fish that translates languages. One hopes that if we do learn to understand dolphin language, the only thing they say to us, before decamping from the planet, isn’t “So long, and thanks for all the fish.”

(Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

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This has to be a spoof - it’s just too good to be true. Stupidfilter is apparently "open-source filter software that can detect rampant stupidity in written English", that will prevent the accessing and posting of grammatically flawed or misspelled content on websites. It will be available in server-side and client-side flavours … unless Rupert Murdoch sues it out of existence for instantly rendering MySpace a dead property. [Via OhGizmo!]

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Social science once again uncovers what would have been obvious after a ten minute think and a cup of coffee: recent research indicates that, despite enabling you to connect with literally thousands of people, social networking sites rarely foster genuine friendships without the two parties actually meeting in meatspace too. To which, I imagine, the response of 90% of teenage MySpace and Facebook users would be “well, duh!” (or possibly O RLY?) 

While this may initially seem like a shocking conclusion, what it actually highlights is the rapid shift of the use and meaning of the word “friend”. Perhaps the post-structuralists were right - will we evolve new words and meanings to cope with the greater number of relationship strata that an increasingly wired world will feature? [Image by Brain Solis]

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