nathanbierma.com archive » not in ‘Eclectic Encyclopedia’

Doctor Dolittle had it wrong, but animals do communicate

Nathan Bierma — Wed, 03 Nov 2004 20:00:37 +0000

“Doctor Dolittle, despite his good intentions, was laboring under a misapprehension,” writes Stephen Anderson, professor of linguistics and psychology at Yale, in his new book “Doctor Dolittle’s Delusion: Animals and the Uniqueness of Human Language” (Yale, $35). Hugh Lofting’s early 20th Century novels about a doctor who converses with animals may be delightful works of literature, [...]

Nicaraguan deaf children create language of their own

Nathan Bierma — Thu, 14 Oct 2004 20:00:42 +0000

A generation ago, Nicaragua was one of the few countries in the world without a widely used sign language for the hearing impaired. That changed in the late 1970s, when a group of deaf Nicaraguan children developed one of their own. Today, Nicaraguan Sign Language (linguists refer to it as ISN for “Idioma de Signos Nicaragense”) [...]

Dictionary offers full menu of culinary terms to digest

Nathan Bierma — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 20:00:53 +0000

Menus make great vocabulary lists, and “there’s no better way to remember a new vocabulary word than to eat it,” writes William Grimes, former restaurant critic for The New York Times, in “Eating Your Words: 2000 Words to Tease Your Taste Buds” (Oxford, $20). His culinary dictionary is interspersed with lists of 113 words for [...]

Apprentices learn ancestral tongues

Nathan Bierma — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 20:00:10 +0000

The death of a language, the late linguist Ken Hale said, is like dropping a bomb on the Louvre. Every time a language dies out, “you lose a culture, intellectual wealth, a work of art.” Preventing these cultural catastrophes in California is the work of Leanne Hinton, Hale’s co-editor of “The Green Book of Language Revitalization [...]

Expectant parents form bonds through ‘belly talk’

Nathan Bierma — Thu, 09 Sep 2004 20:00:39 +0000

Everyone knows how parents talk to their babies, using the childlike syllables and sentences we call “baby talk.” But one researcher is studying how parents talk to the baby before it is born. Sallie Han, a pre-doctoral fellow at the University of Michigan’s Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life, has a name for the attempts [...]

Bilingual writers reflect on their ‘Mother Tongues’

Nathan Bierma — Thu, 02 Sep 2004 20:00:13 +0000

Learning a new language means more than memorizing a new vocabulary and mastering different rules of grammar. It also means adopting a new way of matching words to experience and memory, as “The Genius of Language: Fifteen Writers Reflect on Their Mother Tongues” (Pantheon, $23) illustrates. This collection of essays by bilingual authors—most of them immigrants [...]

Besides jobs, U.S. accents also being exported to India

Nathan Bierma — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 20:00:20 +0000

With the outsourcing of American jobs comes the exporting of American accents. In Bangalore, India—the Silicon Valley of the subcontinent—the booming customer service call center industry depends on coaching Indian workers to talk like they’re from Wisconsin. Sort of. The process is called “accent neutralization.” But in reality, trainers are out to transform, not just tweak, [...]

Rico the dog’s vocabulary restarts linguists’ debate

Nathan Bierma — Thu, 01 Jul 2004 20:00:58 +0000

One thing everyone agrees on: Rico is one special dog. Researchers in Germany spotted Rico on a TV game show and brought him in for tests. What they found, the journal Science reported last month, was that the brilliant border collie seemed to recognize more than 200 German words. That kind of vocabulary was previously thought [...]

‘Wordcraft’ details birth of brand names, semantics of ‘berries’

Nathan Bierma — Tue, 25 May 2004 20:00:21 +0000

There is a moment every marketer both dreams of and fears. It is the time when a brand name, by decree of the dictionary or whims of the zeitgeist, becomes a common noun or a verb. This can be a blessing -- the ultimate validation of a name that is both catchy and meaningful. But it can also be a curse. The more widely a word is used, the harder it is to legally protect as a trademark. So we "xerox" a memo, "fed-ex" a package or "google" a blind date, to the chagrin of squads of copyright attorneys in corporate headquarters.

In a brand name's infancy, however, the thought of gaining this kind of cultural currency is an inspiration to professional namers, says Alex Frankel in his new book Wordcraft: The Art of Turning Little Words Into Big Business (Crown, $24.95).

Business school emphasizes a ‘values-based’ curriculum

Nathan Bierma — Thu, 22 Apr 2004 20:00:40 +0000

The Loyola University Graduate School of Business has new billboards around town that read, “We educate values-based leaders.” As timely as the tagline is in this era of Enron/Tyco corporate scandal, it raises one question: What exactly is a values-based leader? “Most business schools do an effective job educating students about the technical aspects of business—debits, credits, [...]