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Fry's Planet Word
''Fry's Planet Word'' is a documentary series about language. Written and presented by Stephen Fry, five hour-long episodes were first broadcast in September and October 2011 on BBC Two and BBC HD. The series was produced and directed by John-Paul Davidson who worked with Fry on two other documentaries: ''Stephen Fry In America'' (2008) and ''Last Chance to See'' (2009). There is a book to accompany the series published by Michael Joseph, an imprint of Penguin Group. Episodes "Babel" Focusing on the origins of language with topics covered including: *The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and communication between primates *The Turkana language *The FOXP2 gene and its effect on language *Brain patterns from an MRI scan while talking *Victor of Aveyron, feral children, and language acquisition (discussion with psycholinguist Steven Pinker) *The wug test by Jean Berko Gleason *The Klingon language and how d'Armond Speers taught it as the first language to his ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stephen Fry
Stephen John Fry (born 24 August 1957) is an English actor, broadcaster, comedian, director and writer. He first came to prominence in the 1980s as one half of the comic double act Fry and Laurie, alongside Hugh Laurie, with the two starring in ''A Bit of Fry & Laurie'' (1989–1995) and ''Jeeves and Wooster'' (1990–1993). He also starred in the sketch series ''Alfresco'' (1983–1984) alongside Laurie, Emma Thompson and Robbie Coltrane, and in ''Blackadder'' (1986–1989) alongside Rowan Atkinson. Since 2011, he has served as president of the mental health charity Mind. Fry's film acting roles include playing his idol Oscar Wilde in the film ''Wilde'' (1997), for which he was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor; Inspector Thompson in Robert Altman's murder mystery ''Gosford Park'' (2001); and Mr. Johnson in Whit Stillman's ''Love & Friendship'' (2016). He has also made appearances in the films ''Chariots of Fire'' (1981), '' A Fish Called Wanda'' (1988), ' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Victor Of Aveyron
Victor of Aveyron (; c. 1788 – 1828) was a French feral child who was found at the age of around 9. Not only is he considered the most famous feral child, but his case is also the most documented case of a feral child. Upon his discovery, he was captured multiple times, running away from civilization approximately eight times. Eventually his case was taken up by a young physician, Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, who worked with the boy for five years and gave him his name, ''Victor''. Itard was interested in determining what Victor could learn. He devised procedures to teach the boy words and recorded his progress. Based on his work with Victor, Itard broke new ground in the education of the developmentally delayed. Early life Victor was prepubescent when he was captured in 1800, but experienced puberty within a year or two. It is not known when or how he came to live in the woods near Saint-Sernin-sur-Rance, though he was reportedly seen there around 1794. In 1797 he was spotted by th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grimm's Law
Grimm's law (also known as the First Germanic Sound Shift) is a set of sound laws describing the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stop consonants as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC. First systematically put forward by Jacob Grimm but previously remarked upon by Rasmus Rask, it establishes a set of regular correspondences between early Germanic stops and fricatives and stop consonants of certain other centum Indo-European languages. History Grimm's law was the first discovery of a systematic sound change, and it led to the creation of historical phonology as a separate discipline of historical linguistics. The correspondence between Latin ''p'' and Germanic ''f'' was first noted by Friedrich von Schlegel in 1806. In 1818, Rasmus Rask extended the correspondences to other Indo-European languages such as Sanskrit and Greek, and to the full range of consonants involved. In 1822, Jacob Grimm put forth the rule in his book ''Deutsche Grammatik'' and extended it to in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proto-Indo-European Language
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists. Far more work has gone into reconstructing PIE than any other proto-language, and it is the best understood of all proto-languages of its age. The majority of linguistic work during the 19th century was devoted to the reconstruction of PIE or its daughter languages, and many of the modern techniques of linguistic reconstruction (such as the comparative method) were developed as a result. PIE is hypothesized to have been spoken as a single language from 4500 BC to 2500 BC during the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age, though estimates vary by more than a thousand years. According to the prevailing Kurgan hypothesis, the original homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans may have been in the Pontic–Caspian steppe of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Philology
Philology () is the study of language in oral and writing, written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics (with especially strong ties to etymology). Philology is also defined as the study of literary texts as well as oral and written records, the establishment of their authenticity and their original form, and the determination of their meaning. A person who pursues this kind of study is known as a philologist. In older usage, especially British, philology is more general, covering comparative linguistics, comparative and historical linguistics. Classical philology studies classical languages. Classical philology principally originated from the Library of Pergamum and the Library of Alexandria around the fourth century BC, continued by Greeks and Romans throughout the Roman Empire, Roman/Byzantine Empire. It was eventually resumed by European scholars of the Renaissance humanism, Renaissance, where it was s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tower Of Babel
The Tower of Babel ( he, , ''Mīgdal Bāḇel'') narrative in Genesis 11:1–9 is an origin myth meant to explain why the world's peoples speak different languages. According to the story, a united human race speaking a single language and migrating eastward, comes to the land of Shinar (). There they agree to build a city and a tower with its top in the sky. Yahweh, observing their city and tower, confounds their speech so that they can no longer understand each other, and scatters them around the world. Some modern scholars have associated the Tower of Babel with known structures, notably the Etemenanki, a ziggurat dedicated to the Mesopotamian god Marduk in Babylon. A Sumerian story with some similar elements is told in ''Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta''. Narrative Etymology The phrase "Tower of Babel" does not appear in the Bible; it is always "the city and the tower" () or just "the city" (). The original derivation of the name Babel (also the Hebrew name for B ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sign Language
Sign languages (also known as signed languages) are languages that use the visual-manual modality to convey meaning, instead of spoken words. Sign languages are expressed through manual articulation in combination with non-manual markers. Sign languages are full-fledged natural languages with their own grammar and lexicon. Sign languages are not universal and are usually not mutually intelligible, although there are also similarities among different sign languages. Linguists consider both spoken and signed communication to be types of natural language, meaning that both emerged through an abstract, protracted aging process and evolved over time without meticulous planning. Sign language should not be confused with body language, a type of nonverbal communication. Wherever communities of deaf people exist, sign languages have developed as useful means of communication and form the core of local Deaf cultures. Although signing is used primarily by the deaf and hard of hearing, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Klingon Language Institute
The Klingon Language Institute (KLI) is an independent organization originally founded in Flourtown, Pennsylvania and now located in Kentucky. Its goal is to promote the Klingon language and culture. General The KLI has members from all over the world. For 13 years, it published a quarterly journal ' (Klingon for "linguistics"), before discontinuing the paper mailings and changing to an electronic version which quickly stopped entirely. It also published the fiction and poetry magazine ' for three volumes. It now publishes a number of translated works including '' The Wizard of Oz'', ''The Art of War'', the ''Tao Teh Ching'', ''Gilgamesh'', ''Much Ado About Nothing'' and more. Each year, the KLI hosts a five-day conference called the (Klingon for "great meeting"), which is open to both members and anyone interested in the language. The KLI is running several projects, including the administration of the Duolingo Klingon language course, translation into Klingon of a number of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Klingon Language
The Klingon language ( tlh, tlhIngan Hol, links=no, '' '': , ) is the constructed language spoken by a fictional alien race called the Klingons, in the ''Star Trek'' universe. Described in the 1985 book ''The Klingon Dictionary'' by Marc Okrand and deliberately designed to sound "alien", it has a number of typologically uncommon features. The language's basic sound, along with a few words, was devised by actor James Doohan (" Scotty") and producer Jon Povill for '' Star Trek: The Motion Picture''. That film marked the first time the language had been heard. In all previous appearances, Klingons spoke in English, even to each other. Klingon was subsequently developed by Okrand into a full-fledged language. Klingon is sometimes referred to as ''Klingonese'' (most notably in the ''Star Trek: The Original Series'' episode "The Trouble with Tribbles", where it was actually pronounced by a Klingon character as "Klingonee" ), but among the Klingon-speaking community, this is often u ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jean Berko Gleason
Jean Berko Gleason (born 1931) is a psycholinguist and professor emerita in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University who has made fundamental contributions to the understanding of language acquisition in children, aphasia, gender differences in language development, and parent–child interactions. Gleason created the Wug Test, in which a child is shown pictures with nonsense names and then prompted to complete statements about them, and used it to demonstrate that even young children possess implicit knowledge of linguistic morphology. Menn and Ratner have written that "Perhaps no innovation other than the invention of the tape recorder has had such an indelible effect on the field of child language research", the "wug" (one of the imaginary creatures Gleason drew in creating the Wug Test) being "so basic to what sycholinguistsknow and do that increasingly it appears in the popular literature without attribution to its origins." Biography ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wug Test
Jean Berko Gleason (born 1931) is a psycholinguist and professor emerita in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University who has made fundamental contributions to the understanding of language acquisition in children, aphasia, gender differences in language development, and parent–child interactions. Gleason created the Wug Test, in which a child is shown pictures with nonsense names and then prompted to complete statements about them, and used it to demonstrate that even young children possess implicit knowledge of linguistic morphology. Menn and Ratner have written that "Perhaps no innovation other than the invention of the tape recorder has had such an indelible effect on the field of child language research", the "wug" (one of the imaginary creatures Gleason drew in creating the Wug Test) being "so basic to what sycholinguistsknow and do that increasingly it appears in the popular literature without attribution to its origins." Biography ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Steven Pinker
Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and his academic specializations are visual cognition and developmental linguistics. His experimental subjects include mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, children's language development, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, as well as the psychology of cooperation and communication, including euphemism, innuendo, emotional expression, and common knowledge. He has written two technical books that proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In particular, his work with Alan Prince published in 1989 critiqued the connectionist model of how children ac ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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