#cultural-linguistics

#cultural-linguistics

Computational linguistics is a two-way street: You're either using a computer to do things with human language or communicate or translate or teach a foreign language, or you're using computational techniques to learn something about human languages. Her work documenting and preserving endangered languages uses a little bit of both.

When respondents were asked which languages feel the most welcoming, Portuguese emerged on top, selected by 34 percent of participants. Spanish came in a close second with 33 percent of respondents calling it the friendliest, followed by Italian in third. Together, these languages form a clear cluster associated with warmth and approach.

In the practice of psychiatry, we like to think we have better radar than most doctors for identifying incoherent thinking in our fellow humans. Incoherence is one of the crucial signs for potential disasters in the central nervous system-delirium, psychosis, mania, intoxication, stroke, encephalitis. And yet, now in the waning years of my career, I confess that I've practiced this skill of identifying incoherent thinking with only the vaguest definition of coherence, and no measure.

Many colleges and universities have made cuts in these programs, often bolstering STEM programs at their expense. It's a situation that has sparked no small amount of impassioned editorials. The headline of a recent article at The Guardian by Alice Speri referenced an 'existential crisis at U.S. universities,' and Speri's reporting features numerous examples of undergraduate and graduate programs facing cuts or outright elimination.

Parents often hear the warning: "If your child doesn't learn a second language early, they'll never be fluent." Adults, meanwhile, are told: "It's just too late for you to learn now." These claims are familiar and tidy, but misleading. Are they actually true? Is it better to learn a second language as a child or as an adult? The short answer is that it depends on what we mean by "better."

The term "conspiracy theory" calls to mind a variety of dubious claims and controversies, like rumors about Area 51, claims that the Earth is flat, and the movement known as QAnon. At first blush, these phenomena would seem to have little in common with bogus word origins. But there are a variety of false etymologies that spread virally and refuse to go away, in much the same way that stories about chemtrails, black helicopters, and UFOs refuse to die.

Jane Goodall, the late primatologist, was known for her imitations of chimpanzee greetings. When she met with Prince Harry, in 2019, she approached him slowly, making panting noises through circular lips. She prompted him to pat her lightly on the head, then reached up for an embrace, making soft hooting sounds. During her career, Goodall observed chimps engaging in more than a thousand such greetings. They sometimes touched their lips together, breathed into one another's open mouths, or stood on two legs and hugged.

Peter Drucker saw this symbiosis first. He realized that the new industrial order would depend on a worker who produced ideas instead of widgets. The knowledge worker became the engine of prosperity, and management became the social technology that synchronized millions of minds. The modern firm was as much an invention as the transistor it depended on. Three decades later, Tom Peters caught the next wave.

My dad has always had a southern accent: His words fall out of his mouth the way molasses would sound if it could speak, thick and slow. But his "KFC voice," as my sisters and I call it, is country. It's watered-down on work calls and during debates with his West Coast relatives. But it comes out around fellow cattle farmers and old friends from Kentucky, where he grew up.

For the first time, speech has been decoupled from consequence. We now live alongside AI systems that converse knowledgeably and persuasively-deploying claims about the world, explanations, advice, encouragement, apologies, and promises-while bearing no vulnerability for what they say. Millions of people already rely on chatbots powered by large language models, and have integrated these synthetic interlocutors into their personal and professional lives. An LLM's words shape our beliefs, decisions, and actions, yet no speaker stands behind them.

Just before winter break, news broke that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill plans to close its centers for African, Asian, European, Middle Eastern, Latin American and Slavic, Eurasian and East European studies. Though UNC administrators said in a statement that decisions on closures are not finalized, they confirmed they are evaluating centers and institutes as part of a budget-cutting effort in response to state and federal funding changes.

Evaluating a language by its usefulness is reductive about as soul-destroying as telling a passionate mathematician that they don't need to bother learning complex theorems because a computer could do it. I did two language A-levels (German and Japanese) and went on to do a Japanese degree at university. Despite Japanese being less useful than Spanish in terms of the number of speakers, it has enriched my life in countless ways.

Led Zeppelin warned us about the perils of misunderstood communications in relationships. Failing to translate what we are trying to say or do so that someone else gets it is the root of so many problems. But translation is a fantastic find when it goes right. Here are some things I've learned about translating meaning from a lifetime of speaking numerous languages, practicing a wide array of martial arts, and communicating science.

If you don't know it, Ecclesiastes is a collection of Old Testament verses in which the eponymous title character discourses on the apparent meaninglessness of pleasure, accomplishment, wealth, politics, and life itself in the face of the infinitude of the universe and the absolute perfection of God. It is the source of many of our most cliched phrases, such as there is a time for everything and there is nothing new under the sun.

I grew up in West Baltimore where I experienced homelessness for almost the entirety of high school. For me, philosophy emerged in situations of precarity and uncertainty. Those formative years, spent not so much in a single home as in a patchwork of many, shaped what are now some of my central philosophical concerns: belonging, exclusion, and the status of those at the margins of society, those at the threshold of belonging.

A professional philosopher outside the academy walls can act as a popularizer (the goal here is to make philosophy more accessible to the general public), an applied ethicist (the major task is to offer an analysis of various specific moral issues that arise within a society), and a public intellectual (I limit this role to questions that have political connotation). Of course, there are overlaps between these roles and they certainly do not exhaust all possible forms of public engagement of a professional philosopher.