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If your ears are burning it's said someone is talking about you, but Australian scientists say its more likely you're having a brainwave. Two researchers in Canberra have developed a high-tech hat that monitors brain activity via changes in ear temperature -- offering a cheap way to assess risks for patients ahead of brain surgery. By plugging the converted hard hat into a patient's ears researchers can measure tiny changes in eardrum temperature caused by an increased flow of blood to the side of the brain used to concentrate on a task. "If an area of the brain is more...

The US military has always been sabotaging itself with its flawed "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy on gay service personnel and now a government study shows exactly how much. The military has discharged 9,488 soldiers for being gay, lesbian, or bisexual since the policy went into effect in 1993. It has had to spend at least $200 million to recruit and train their replacementsmany in the key areas of intelligence, linguistics, interrogations, and code-breaking. The statistics come from a new Government Accountability Office report initiated by US Representative Martin Meehan of Lowell, who was joined by 19 other lawmakers in...

In a June appearance on NBC's Today Show, singer Marc Anthony made an unusual but, according to some linguists, not-so-surprising word choice. When co-host Matt Lauer asked Anthony how he'd spend the upcoming weekend, Anthony said, "Y'all know I don't talk about my personal life." A New York native of Puerto Rican descent using "y'all," a distinctly Southern term? Linguists Guy Bailey and Jan Tillery would say Anthony is exhibit A in a national trend that is spreading the uses of "y'all" beyond the South. The two, who teach at the University of Texas at San Antonio, wrote an article...

According to Sunday's S.F.Chronicle, House Democrats meet tomorrow with UC Berkeley linguistic prof George Lakoff in hopes the wordwright can correct their spin. Watch this one!!!! Lakoff is expected to advise the politician on what terminology to use. The big question is this: will the mass media follow? My money says it will. I have 40 years experience in the news media to back my bet. Need proof? The media was powerful enough to limit "choice" to one subject. That alone should be cause for watching the "watchdog." Remember when the press was called "the running dog" of the establishment?...

As Democrats continue their post-election soul-searching, a new guru is emerging. He isn't an internet whizz-kid or a campaign strategist, but a bearded Berkeley linguist who says he knows why Republicans keep winning. George Lakoff says it all comes down to "frames" the mental structures people use when they think about words. Conservatives are masters of framing, using expressions such as "tax relief" to shape the debate to their advantage, he says. If Democrats could do the same, they would perform much better at the polls.

FRANKFURT - Mark Twain found its rules - and exceptions - so complicated, he dubbed it "The Awful German Language." Indeed, experts have struggled to streamline Germany's notoriously difficult spelling rules. Then six years ago, German culture ministers and other German-speaking countries forged a controversial agreement. Among other things, it replaced the idiosyncratic ß, called Esszet, with a double "s" at times. It loosened the use of commas, Germanized foreign words - so that "spaghetti" became "spagetti" and "ketchup" "ketschup" - and broke up interminable compound nouns. The new spelling was sold in schools as a breakthrough reform. But it...

cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdgnieg! Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?

The first character is the sampi, as it was used (briefly) in the Ionic alphabet as a sibilant. The first question to answer is whether it should be separated from the numerical sampi at all... The second question is what the phonetic value of sampi was... Jeffery (1990:39)... also suspects that sampi was originally borrowed from Carian, and used to express the Carian sibilant in loanwords... In the pre-Hellenic language of Lemnos (possibly related to Etruscan), it is used, but Jeffery has no idea what it sounded like. In the older inscriptions of the non-Hellenic language of Phrygia (related...

In a dusty valley in southern Lebanon, "Sgt. John Smith" of the Special Forces scans the scene in front of him. Ahead is a village known as Talle. His immediate mission: to find out who the local headman is and make his way to that house. All discussions with the villagers will have to be conducted in Arabic, and Sergeant Smith must comport himself with the utmost awareness of local customs so as not to arouse hostility. If successful, he will be paving the way for the rest of his unit to begin reconstruction work in the village. Sergeant Smith...

[Note: This is a long read, but worth it. This is how small town California has to deal with the illegal alien problem -- but with a strange twist. It is not the usual sob story; it gives some depth to the whole miserable mess and raises some very ugly questions.] Immigrants contend with economics, culture in pregnancy As she shepherds scores of Monterey County's most vulnerable mothers-to-be through their pregnancies, Celia Serrato has learned to communicate without words. Two-thirds of her patients at Clinica de Salud in Greenfield are indigenous Mexicans from the impoverished southern state of Oaxaca. Many...

A Biological Dig for the Roots of Language By NICHOLAS WADE Correction Appended Once upon a time, there were very few human languages and perhaps only one, and if so, all of the 6,000 or so languages spoken round the world today must be descended from it. If that family tree of human language could be reconstructed and its branching points dated, a wonderful new window would be opened onto the human past. Yet in the view of many historical linguists, the chances of drawing up such a tree are virtually nil and those who suppose otherwise are chasing a...

Deaf people are making a profound contribution to the study of language Ann Senghas We all speak smile JUST as biologists rarely see a new species arise, linguists rarely see a new language being born. You have to be in the right place at the right time, which usually you are not. But the past few decades have seen an exception. Linguists have been able to follow the formation of a new language in Nicaragua. The catch is that it is not a spoken language but, rather, a sign language which arose spontaneously in deaf children. Ann Senghas, of Columbia...

I have established a new thread concerning this article at the request of other Free Republic members wishing to continue its discussion. See the original post at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1063034/posts?page=1,50

In this essay I shall be implementing an orthografic innovation: at all instances in which the combination “ph” is part of a word and is pronounced as “f,” it shall be spelled as “f.” (For example, “phenomenon” shall become “fenomenon.”) Where the “p” and “h” sounds are actually pronounced, they shall be represented as such (For example, “uphold” shall remain spelled as formerly). This adjustment shall apply to all words other than proper names and components of titles of other men’s written works. Rationally speaking, this reform can dispel considerable confusion. For example, what, in the status quo, can prevent...

At last, a scientific study of the lingo still spoken in an exotic empire is in the offing. "Speech study explores distinctions of Texas twang," said the headline in The New York Times. According to the story under it, a couple of linguists out of San Antone - Guy Bailey and Jan Tillery - are working up a new study of what they call TXE, or Texas English, which they class as a sub-dialect of American Southern English. (It will no doubt surprise Texans to discover that they're sub-anything, even after this year's oh-so-satisfying Arkansas-Texas game, in that 38-28 order.)...

At last, a scientific study of the lingo spoken on the other side of the river (Sabine or Red, as the case may be) is in the offing. "Speech study explores distinctions of Texas twang," said a headline in last Saturday's paper. According to the story under it, a couple of linguists out of San Antone — Guy Bailey and Jan Tillery — are working up a new study of what they call TXE, or Texas English, which they class as a subdialect of American Southern English. (It will no doubt surprise Texans to discover that they're sub-anything, even after...

Michael Stravato for The New York Times John O. Greer is an architecture teacher at Texas A&M University. But when a couple of researchers sat down and talked with him recently, they were less interested in what he said than in how he said it. COLLEGE STATION, Tex. — "Are yew jus' tryin' to git me to talk, is that the ah-deah?" That was the idea. John O. Greer, an architecture teacher at Texas A&M University, sat at his dining table between two interrogators and their tape recorder. They had precisely 258 questions for him. But it waddn what...

PARIS (AFP) - The vast group of languages that dominates Europe and much of Central and South Asia originated around 8,000 years ago among farmers in what is now Anatolia, Turkey. So say a pair of New Zealand academics who have remarkably retraced the family tree of so-called Indo-European languages -- a linguistic classification that covers scores of tongues ranging from Faroese to Hindi by way of English, French, German, Gujarati, Nepalese and Russian. Russell Gray and Quentin Atkinson, psychologists at the University of Auckland, built their language tree on the same principles as the theory of genetic evolution. According...

The conservative worldview, the strict father model, assumes that the world is dangerous and difficult and that children are born bad and must be made good. The strict father is the moral authority who supports and defends the family, tells his wife what to do, and teaches his kids right from wrong. The only way to do that is through painful discipline — physical punishment that by adulthood will become internal discipline. The good people are the disciplined people. Once grown, the self-reliant, disciplined children are on their own. Those children who remain dependent (who were spoiled, overly willful, or...

The Absurdity of 'Thinking in Language' This paper has been read to the University of Southern California philosophy group and the Boston 1972 meeting of the American Philosophical Association, as well as to the Houston meeting of the Southwestern Philosophical Society. Appeared in The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, IV(1973), pp. 125-132. Numbers in "<>" refer to this journal. Among the principal assumptions of major portions of philosophy in recent decades have been: (1) That philosophy somehow consists of (some sort of) logic, and (2) that logic is a study of and theory about (some sort of) language. There, of...