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POPSAwesome research/ Homework resource I only found this the other day and mostly I'm clipping it for my own uses; however, it's a great resource and I thought I'd share. The site itself has pretty cool info too. 'Hope you guys like the clip.
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POPSThe 10 Weirdest Facts about American Presidents 7. Calvin Coolidge, the 30th president, was reported to be a very interesting character. When not having his head massaged with Vaseline during breakfasts in bed or riding his own mechanical bull, he was ringing the White House doorbell and then running off to hide. 8. So far, all American presidents have claimed ancestry limited to one or more of just seven nationalities: Dutch, English, German, Irish, Scottish, Swiss, and Welsh. 9. Grover Cleveland was the only president to openly admit that he had fathered an illegitimate child. 10. There were four presidents who were not actual presidents of the United States: Sam Houston, Mirabeau Lamar, and Anson Jones were all presidents of the Republic of Texas. Jefferson Davis was President of the Confederate States of America.
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POPSThe language you speak affects your personality A study of bilingual women suggests that when you switch from speaking one language to another, your personality and your perceptions change as well. I've experienced this myself switching between German and English.
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POPSLinguistic superpowers The book Limits of Language by Swedish linguist Mikael Parkvall is a sort of languages-only Guinness Book of Records, listing everything that’s large, small and otherwise interesting about the manifold manners of human speech and associated forms of communication. One item deals with the world’s most linguistically diverse countries, and is illustrated with this map, of the world’s ‘linguistic superpowers’.
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POPSMe, Myself and I The generally accepted linguistic explanation for the capital “I” is that it could not stand alone, uncapitalized, as a single letter, which allows for the possibility that early manuscripts and typography played a major role in shaping the national character of English-speaking countries. So what effect has capitalizing “I” but not “you” — or any other pronoun — had on English speakers? It’s impossible to know, but perhaps our individualistic, workaholic society would be more rooted in community and quality and less focused on money and success if we each thought of ourselves as a small “i” with a sweet little dot. There have, of course, been plenty of rich and dominant cultures throughout history that have gotten by just fine without capitalizing the first-person pronoun or ever writing it down at all. There have also been cultures that committed atrocities even while capitalizing “you.”
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POPSLanguage Without Numbers: Amazonian Tribe Has No Word To Express 'One,' Other Numbers However, the MIT team decided to add a new twist--they started with 10 objects and asked the tribe members to count down. In that experiment, the tribe members used the word previously thought to mean "two" when as many as five or six objects were present, and they used the word for "one" for any quantity between one and four. This indicates that "these aren't counting numbers at all," said Gibson. "They're signifying relative quantities." He said this type of counting strategy has never been observed before, although it may also be found in other languages believed to have "one," "two," and "many" counting words.
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POPSYour Bi-Lingual Kitty "It’s kind of nice to think your kitty has gone to the effort to learn a second language to communicate with you. Sure, she did it mostly out of necessity, but also out of affection. She wouldn’t meow just for your attention if she didn’t enjoy a relationship with you."
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POPSNew Math Theory Explains Toddler's "Word Spurt" A bell-shaped word distribution and a steady child learning rate turn out to be enough to bring about the extraordinary explosion seen in children's vocabularies around this age. McMurray notes that languages have only a small number of very easy-to-learn words and many more intermediate words. So when a baby has been exposed to enough language to learn the easy words, she will acquire just a few words. As she is exposed to more language, she begins to learn the medium words. And because there are a lot of medium words, she is likely to pick up a lot of words at this stage. This, McMurray says, is the vocabulary explosion.
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POPSWhen Human Rights Extend to Nonhumans The 300 apes in Spanish zoos would not be freed, but better conditions would be mandated. Meanwhile, even in democracies, the law accords diminished rights to many humans: children, prisoners, the insane, the senile. Teenagers may not vote, philosophers who slip into dementia may be lashed to their beds, courts can order surgery or force-feeding. Spain’s Catholic bishops attacked the vote as undermining a divine will that placed humans above animals. One said such thinking led to abortion, euthanasia and ethnic cleansing.
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POPSConscience versus Belief and Dogma Although those with deep beliefs and expressed values do any amazing job of advertising their compassion and calls for justice in the names of far away people, only conscience cam motivate love for the person next door. Who is my neighbour?
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POPSSimply the best way to learn languages. I just listened to an interview with the founder of this site/software on the radio. and was quite impressed. To me it sounded like a superior way to learn other languages, something I've always wished to do. I am able to semi-converse in a limited number of languages, especially after a couple of glasses of backbone.
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POPSSave the languages, save the world Linguistic integrity is as important to our survival as a species as environmentalism. Check out the source to see why. Many resources and information at www.terralingua.org.
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POPSThe Stick Figure Guide to Winning in Iraq As described in the article, the creator of this humorous, optimistic cartoon, a young Captain Travis Patriquin, was killed by an improvised explosive device in Iraq just last Wednesday. His creation has been circulating among the troops and, lately, across the internet. PDF version of the presentation .
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POPSRare words 'mutate' faster than common ones. I suppose if people don't use a word it is forgotten, or badly remembered. There was a great shift in language in Britain after the Black Plague. Labor became expensive and people who once were 'common folk' acquired money, land, and assumed positions of power. French that was spoken in the royal court, and was considered the 'official' language. This gave us many words describing end products, like beef, veal, and bacon, while words like calf,cow,and pig, which were in common use and concerned things that involved everyday farmers, and workers, The two dialects combining were a significant element in the evolution of the English language, because of the way it changed the frequency of word use.
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