Okay. I didn’t want to write a post on ChatGPT, because its public release has been like shrapnel through the meat of the internet – but at the end of the day this IS a language blog, and I would be remiss for not doing due diligence. If you’ve been under a rock for the…
Category: Polemical Topics
Recap: What is “baby sign language”? I made an attempt at defining this concept in the last post, which I’ll reproduce here: baby sign language is signing between (hearing) parents/caregivers and young children, where the signs are either from a real sign language like ASL, are idiosyncratic inventions of the family using them, or are…
Can animals have language the way humans have language? From recent news headlines about a famous ape and her passing, one might conclude: yes. Titles such as “Koko: Gorilla who mastered sign language dies in California” and “Koko, the Gorilla Who Knew Sign Language, Dies at 46” imply that non-human primates, at least, can learn and use…
I’m a Douglas Hofstadter fan. I read his book I Am a Strange Loop years ago, and it remains one of my three favorite non-fiction books, period. I highly recommend it to anyone who is at all interested in the nature of consciousness. The cognitive scientist’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid…
In a recent Lyft Line, it surfaced that the other rider in the car with me also had a linguistics background. Our driver was a non-native English speaker (from his accent maybe Russian) – although his English was pretty fluent. As he was deciding whether to make a left turn at a chaotic, construction-clogged intersection,…