Does Chinese take more brain power?

LarryLatham · Post by **LarryLatham** » Mon Oct 04, 2004 6:18 pm

Well, all I have read of Hannas' book is the excerpt on the weblink you gave us, Duncan. I didn't see anything there that I found "objectionable", but then, it is clear that he intends to use these ideas to support a larger thesis. I might not like the larger thesis, but his thoughts about the relationship of characters to morphemes and sounds make sense to me.

What do you find objectionable?

Larry Latham

Duncan Powrie · Post by **Duncan Powrie** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 4:37 am

Well, anyone who starts saying things like "The Chinese are incapable of abstract thought", or "They are like the little green men in Mars Attacks, except they aren't green", and all this because they don't use our superior western alphabet (which apparently churns out Einsteins by the classload, even in Wolverhampton!* 100% literacy in the UK, don't you know!!) is getting a bit silly, aren't they? (anyone care to analyze or correct the grammar or agreement or whatever in that sentence?!).

You get the impression that Mr Hannas didn't really enjoy his study of Chinese very much, and that the only reason he got forced himself through it was to exact some kind of measure of revenge by writing his book. Guys like John DeFrancis may be adherants of orthographic reform, and also critics of China's current policies to promote (or should that be "maintain"!) literacy, but DeFrancis is the only one who cautions against silly theorizing about the supposed superiority of one civilization over another (I recall him saying something like why not have a "milk" theory instead of an "alphabet" theory to explain the "superiority" of the west, seeing as most of the nations of north-western Europe drink milk).

* Wolverhampton came last in a recent UK nationwide general knowledge quiz based on the Encarta database.

LarryLatham · Post by **LarryLatham** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 7:35 am

Well, anyone who starts saying things like "The Chinese are incapable of abstract thought", or "They are like the little green men in Mars Attacks, except they aren't green",

He (gasp) said that???

Gosh! I'd better go back and read it again!!!

Larry Latham

Duncan Powrie · Post by **Duncan Powrie** » Fri Oct 08, 2004 8:49 pm

Yes, he did say that. He also said nasty (unprintable) things about woodcutter's mum.

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Tue Nov 30, 2004 12:19 am

Decided to post here rather than add to the often needless proliferation of threads by starting a new one!

I spotted a story entitled "Brain changes between telling truth and lying" on msn.co.uk today (I get directed there when I sign out from my hotmail, you see).

Bascially, U.S. researchers were scanning people's brains with fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) - with an eye perhaps to developing lie-detecting technology for today's security-conscious world - and discovered that more areas of the brain were used when test subjects lied (=were required to lie).

(For all you psycholinguists, the actual findings were that '(there were) a total of seven areas of activation in the deception (group)...(and) four areas of activity in the truth-telling arm'; that
'Lying caused activity in the frontal part of the brain --- the medial inferior and pre-central areas, as well as the hippocampus and middle temporal regions and the limbic areas. Some of these are involved in emotional responses', and finally that 'During a truthful response, the fMRI showed activation of parts of the brain's frontal lobe, temporal lobe and cingulate gyrus').

Anyway, what I found most interesting was the experimental method itself:

Faro and colleagues tested 10 volunteers. Six of them were asked to shoot a toy gun and then lie and say they didn't do it. Three others who watched told the truth about what happened. One volunteer dropped out of the study.

While giving their "testimony," the volunteers were hooked up both to a conventional polygraph and also had their brain activity imaged using fMRI, which used a strong magnet to provide a real-time picture of brain activity.

If linguists had been conducting that experiment you can bet they'd have got the witnesses to say that they hadn't fired the gun either.

The experiment was conducted by Dr. Scott Faro, director of the Functional Brain Imaging Centre at Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia. He presented his team's findings (that "There were clear differences between the liars and the truth-tellers", and that "Overall, it seemed to take more brain effort to tell the lie than to tell the truth") to a meeting in Chicago of the Radiological Society of North America.

In the further butchered (by me) words of the Reuters report, 'Faro said the study was small and limited. Volunteers were not asked to try especially hard to deceive the equipment, he said -- noting that it has been documented that some people can fool a polygraph using various techniques.'

I didn't post the link because again (not looked at my "Earthquake!" thread yet?), it was so looong that it would've affected the right margin of the thread; and I didn't want to paste the story in in its entirety in case I ended up locked cages within cages (a hamstercage is bad enough, but prison too, for copyright infringement, would finish me off).

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Tue Nov 30, 2004 2:18 am

It will be a cold day in hell when the electrodes-on-the-brain mob actually advance the cause of language learning in any way, shape or form.

I'm sorry, I'm getting very sharp and over opinionated these days. It's probably because Larry isn't around much to tell me off.

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Tue Nov 30, 2004 3:35 am

woodcutter wrote:It will be a cold day in hell when the electrodes-on-the-brain mob actually advance the cause of language learning in any way, shape or form.

I wouldn't be so sure.

Observing how the brain is behaving as we speak might eventually make it possible to jump between speech and brain (and vice-versa) and achieve complete understanding, without the need for agonizing rules (of e.g. either the learner or the Chomskyan kind) getting in the way all the time.

Sounds like science fiction I know, and I don't see how scientists will ever be able to fully observe what goes on at the neural level, across the countless neurones involved, but it's easy to see a practical application of even the current technology almost straight away: you sit you students (woodcutter) in this fMRI machine (perhaps you say they'll get a bit of a tan or something, if you don't want to let the cat totally out of the bag) and drill them on the positive and negative forms of basic verbs. When you get to "Repeat after me: I like my teacher...good! Now say*, I don't mind doing drills," you obviously take careful note of who the liars are and crank up the electro-shock convulsive treatment in the next lesson.

* Allusion to a certain scene in South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut.

LarryLatham · Post by **LarryLatham** » Tue Nov 30, 2004 4:39 am

woodcutter wrote:...I'm getting very sharp and over opinionated these days. It's probably because Larry isn't around much to tell me off.

I'm around, woody, but I've aged a bit, I suppose, and perhaps am feeling mellower as a result. Anyway, you haven't recently said anything I can seriously object to. Maybe this forum is in danger of boring us all to death.

Larry Latham

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Tue Nov 30, 2004 6:05 am

Ooh, hiya Larry. Don't mind that we all miss you a lot and want you to start contributing again, go on, just jet off on another one of your OAP round-the-world cruises!

Yeah, it can get a bit boring around here sometimes, I guess it's all been said and done before (look at the response I "generated" on the Dogme-related thread - BTW, did I see your name flash up on the postings for a brief second before you deleted something there, Larry?).

But that should't stop any new, young blood, any bright fresh "talent" from reinventing the teaching bandwagon's square wheel or posting anything they like (profound or sometimes sorta irrelevant), it may catch a newbie's eye, and in the process of being chatted through raise some misconceptions or insights that even oldies might like to comment on (not sure in saying all that if I myself am a newbie or an oldie. An oldie in terms of "Dave years", a newbie in terms of "actual years" (age, spent teaching, thinking etc)).

It's been said before, but there's still life left in many threads, and certainly in the forum as a whole. What's the matter Larry, the flowerbeds didn't take too well, and now winter's coming? Well, don't worry, soon it'll be spring again.

lolwhites · Post by **lolwhites** » Tue Nov 30, 2004 11:14 am

On the subject of lying, I remember hearing a radio report a few years ago about someone who had discovered a language spoken by an indigenous tribe in Brazil. The strange thing about this language was that it was almost impossible to lie in it.

Apparently it was very highly inflected in ways that might seem strange to us. For example, where in English we would say Fred Flintstone skinned the mammoth, in this language the form of the verb would depend on whether you had witnessed the incident yourself or had had it recounted to you. So, I saw FF skin the mammoth and I was told FF skinned the mammoth would need a different for of the verb skin The upshot of this was that lies were incredibly difficult to back up as in order to keep your story straight you really had to have all bases covered, otherwise the inconsistencies in verb forms would very quickly find you out!

Unfortunately I don't remember the name of the language and can't think of any search terms which don't return thousands of irrelevant pages. Has anyone else heard this story? My brother heard the same report so I know I didn't dream it!

Stephen Jones · Post by **Stephen Jones** » Tue Nov 30, 2004 4:47 pm

Many of the prosecution cases at the International Criminal Court set up in Arusha, Tanzania, to judge the culprits of the Rwandan genocide have collapsed because the prosecution witnesses were amazingly unclear as to whether they saw something happen themselves or were told about it.

Being a judge in that Brazilian tribe must be a plum job!

LarryLatham · Post by **LarryLatham** » Tue Nov 30, 2004 4:55 pm

I believe I've heard of this obscure language somewhere in my distant past, but I remain extremely skeptical that such a language could actually exist. It is human nature to lie (OK, "embellish"), regardless of your 'tribe', and I find it exceedingly difficult to imagine that a skillful and determined liar couldn't find a way to do it in any language.

Larry Latham

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Fri Dec 03, 2004 8:55 am

Immense kudos to the first person who finds out what the language lolwhites is referring to is actually called!

If you also manage to bag an anaconda over 30 feet on your trip into the Amazonian interior, you could net yourself a sizeable reward, too (like linguistics alone is going to pay well!).

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Tue Feb 22, 2005 4:01 am

Hey, lolwhites, the language you referred to above wasn't Tuyuca, was it?*

The reason I ask is because P.H. Matthews discusses the five "evidentials" of Tuyuca in Chapter 5 of his Linguistics: A Very Short Introduction (OUP):

Look, for example, at Fig. 11. It shows a young woman wearing a sling, in the way she might do if she had broken her arm.** In English, then, one might unthinkingly report this with some sentence such as 'She has broken her right arm.' Is it certain, however, that she has done so? Suppose you have seen her in reality. Under examination, you might admit that, actually, she was simply wearing a sling. The rest is an assumption based on what you have seen, and could have been mistaken.

Here too we are dealing with distinctions that many major languages do not make. In English one is forced, for example, to distinguich an event entirely in the past from one that bears a relation to the time of speaking: 'She had ("have-PAST") broken her right arm' as opposed to 'She has'. One is not forced to distinguish further forms we might gloss, in addition, "have-PAST.KNOWN", or "have-PAST.ASSUMED". On other occassions forms like 'has' are used in repeating things that one has heard from someone else. Again, however, there are no forms that distinguish "have-KNOWN" from, alternatively, "have-REPORTED". Even when they are reporting no more than a rumour, people can still use the same expression 'She has broken her right arm'.

There are other languages, however, in which glosses like this are not out of place. Assertions rely on different kinds of evidence; therefore it is only honest and natural, as their speakers might quite reasonably argue, that one should be forced to use forms with an "evidential" meaning, that distinguish among them. How slack they might think languages like English are, whose grammar does not make distinctions of this sort!***

Tuyuca, for example, spoken on the boundary between Colombia and Brazil, distinguishes as many as five "evidentials" (see box). The distinctions are obligatory: speakers cannot make an assertion without clarifying whether it refers to something they have seen, or to something they have heard about, and so on. If they have seen it, they should use a form for evidential number (1), glossed "VISUAL". If they have merely heard about it, they should instead use a "SECONDHAND" form, number (4). A speaker may, of course, lie; but there is no generalized equivalent of 'She has broken her right arm', with no evidential.

BTW, the five evidentials of Tuyuca are VISUAL, NON-VISUAL, APPARENT, SECONDHAND and ASSUMED. The main difference between APPARENT and ASSUMED seems to be that the former is 'rare in in reference to the present, and logically excluded in statements with present reference to the speaker': the examples Matthews supplies are '(Apparently) I threw it away - said of something found to be missing', and 'You are sick - ASSUMED - judgement based on the way someone was groaning'.

*Then again, maybe not! See the bold bit towards the end of the quote above; also, Matthew's discussion and examples draw upon 'an account by Janet Barnes in the 1980s', which seems to be a little too old to also be the basis of your presumably then topical 'radio report a few years ago about someone who had discovered a language spoken by an indigenous tribe in Brazil'.

**The picture itself has a caption under it which reads: A young woman wearing a sling. Has she or has she not broken her arm?

***English speakers can, of course, express extra meanings through lexical/adverbial e.g. stance adverb/phrasal means, but there are no inflections that do this automatically for, ultimately, the listener's benefit (so the argument seems to be going here) - an English speaker might counter that Tuyuca speakers risk boring the listener with excruciating levels of detail in non-life-and-death matters, much like your grandmother might irritate you by trying to remember who exactly said what and in what order during one of her involved and rambling reports about, among other things, the scandalous price of broccoli florets recently. (Obviously this is my addition here, not Matthews'! Matthews simply has this to say in conclusion: 'English is among the many languages that, from a Tuyuca viewpoint, "lack" evidentials. That is hardly because they are not needed for precise communication. It is simply that the histories of these languages happen to have been quite different.').

lolwhites · Post by **lolwhites** » Tue Feb 22, 2005 8:17 am

Could well be the same one fluff. Have some rodent pellets on me

Actually, having had the time to read your post more fully, I remember hearing the report around 2000 so I take your point about how topical the report was. However, the geography and description seem to hold. Maybe the report I heard was talking about a language from the same branch of the family tree.

As I remember the interviewee didn't actually say it was impossible to lie, but it was hard to embellish your story without mixing up your inflections. Presumably this would be easier for a native speaker than someone learning it.