At the risk of being chucked among the long suffering bibliobiuli of this world, I’d like to say that I think that non-stop reading is fun, and the next best thing to reading a good book is to share that book with others; and recommending or panning a book for the good people who read this board is, for me, the third best thing.
So, like it or not (after all it isn't like I'm wasting good ink and paper) here goes...

THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT; How the mind creates language.
Steven Pinker 1994

$ .93 used paperback from bookstore near the shores of Gitche Gumee, Michigan.

A classic of witty and wise words about words that is wonderfully written. . Four stars.

Excerpt
...The critic Mary McCarthy once said of her rival Lillian Hellman, “ Every word she writes is a lie including ‘and ‘ and ‘the’.”

This insult relies on the fact that a sentence is the smallest thing that can be either true or false; a single word can’t be either....

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GENES, PEOPLE, AND LANGUAGES (no subtitle, a translation of six lectures)
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Storza 2000

Free, on loan from public library, small book 198 pages.

Not so hot. Easy reading but the content is what you might expect from the translation of six spoken lecture made into a printed book. One lecture (chapter) however , includes a most exacting meaning for the term “race”. Three stars.

Excerpt
...Most important are some cultural changes that have spread out from Tibet and parts of India. Polygyny (the practice of keeping multiple wives) and polyandry (the practice of keeping multiple husbands) became popular practices which still exist. These two forms of polygamy are sometimes found in the same village. There are even simultaneous marriages between multiple men and multiple women. The wives and husbands in these multiple marriages are usually siblings, which probably explains these arrangements, since they avoid dividing inheritances and agricultural lands between siblings....

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DO ANIMALS THINK? ( the picture on the cover is the subtitle)
Clive D.L. Wynne 2004

Free, on loan from public library. Small book, 244 pages.
Lucky you if you find time to read this book . Clive Wynne brings an element of harsh truth to the science of animal behavior. No longer will we send our fifty bucks to Hawaii so that Koko can learn a few more words of monkey talk. Instead we will all afterwards spend our fifty bucks helping the magnificent mountain gorillas of Africa from being eaten by the hungry natives. Four stars.

Excerpt (paraphrased)

Remember the experiments conducted a few years back where the experimenter would dab a spot of red paint on a variety of animals and then sit them before mirrors to see if they would try to rub the paint off? The test was thought to determine which animals had a sense of self. i.e. an awareness that they existed as an entity separate from the external world.

The results were surprising. Only the higher apes exhibited a clear sense of self-awareness and some of them seemed not so sure. This made a friend of Clive Wynne mad.

Marc Bekoff (the friend) demonstrated that his pet dog Jethro has a sense of self-awareness too. Bekoff went around picking up yellow snow that Jethro and other dogs had urinated on and moved the clumps of yellow snow to spots further up the path where Jethro the dog would come across them.

The results were unequivocal . Jethro spent much less time sniffing, and was less likely to re-urinate on his own urinated snow than on the urinated snow of other dogs, ergo, Jethro proved self awareness based on urine --sorta like...
I pee; therefore I am.
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One lecture (chapter) [of Genes, People, Languages by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza] however , includes a most exacting meaning for the term "race".

You might want to check out what Cavalli-Sforza and son say about race in their The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolution 1995: "The idea of race in the human species serves no purpose. The structure of human populations is extremely complex and changes from area to area; there are always nuances deriving from continual migration across and within the borders of every nation, which make clear distinctions impossible." The 9th chapter of the book (on Race and Racism) from which this excerpt comes sums up pretty much how I feel about the term race and its "meaning".

...since they avoid dividing inheritances and agricultural lands between siblings....

...and it reduces the gene pool to a little puddle.

The idea of race in the human species serves no purpose
Thanks for the reference. I fully agree with you. It cannot be repeated too often. The term race should be reserved for the products of systematic breeding, in the transitive sense. Darwin unfortunately contributed to the muddle.

...and it reduces the gene pool to a little puddle.

Me too, Musick, I wondered about the inbreeding that would occur within a social structure that allows multi- marriages of male and female siblings, but after giving it a bit of thought I decided that Cavalli- Sforza’s account of events suffered during translation and what the book said wasn’t exactly what was going on in Tibet.
And perhaps, I might add, the Italian language without gestures isn’t the best vehicle for writing clear science...have you read any breezy Umberto Eco lately?

(That’s a joke, and today, Musick, we must say “that’s a joke” when we imply that one language is different from others because today, sadly, it is not socially correct to critically distinguish one particular language from another. What a shame.)

And in the case of Umberto Eco, it definitely is not the Italian language that obfuscates .
At one time, at some place, someone wrote a rule that requires all linguists and semanticists to be obscure.

And they mostly are. Except for jheem and wsieber, both of whom have strong feelings about the term “race”.

( I do too, guys, and I will answer your posts when I return home God willing and the Creeks don’t rise later on tonight.*)

* Here in Alabama we can't ever be sure about them pesky, uppity, Creek indians.

...and it reduces the gene pool to a little puddle.

Me too, Musick, I wondered about the inbreeding that would occur within a social structure that allows multi- marriages of male and female siblings, but after giving it a bit of thought I decided that Cavalli- Sforza’s account of events suffered during translation and what the book said wasn’t exactly what was going on in Tibet.

The way I interpret it, I don't think he meant a brother would marry his sister. I think he meant that a man (Mr Smith for example) could get a wife from a separate family (Miss Amelia Jones) and go ahead and marry all of her sisters (Julie, Elmedia and Gwendolyn).

So there would be no inbreeding involved.

Although it's rather presumptious to assume there would be offspring created from these *marrriages <ahem>, if it were the case, I think it would get progressively harder for offspring A to not "run into" one of either your father's or mother's offsprings B thru Z. Although with the whole thing being so open 'n all, one would have a good idea of who is whom.

Out Damned Book. Back to your Shelves

Today is not a good day for me to write a review of the books that I have just read. I twisted my knee badly and have spent the last two days confined to my bed where the only sport available has been the reading of twenty books. My mood is such that if my hero President Bush walked in I would call him a flaming metrosexual and tell him and his entourage to go take a hike.

None-the-less, because you people count on me to post these reviews that no one reads I feel duty-driven to oblige so...

NEW WORDS; They still have that new word smell
Edited by Orin Hargraves 2004
On loan from Library, 320 pages.

In his introduction Hargrove writes...”The need for language to keep pace with changes and innovations in human activities is one of the main engines of neology ( that is, the coining of new words ) and in some degree the words appearing in this dictionary reflect the preoccupations of our times.”
And for that zippy comment, and for the inclusion of some right nifty new words in this 2,500 new word dictionary, I give this book Four Stars.

Excerpt

bashert (ba’shert) noun (in Jewish use) a person’s soulmate, especially when considered as a preordained marriage partner. I an a 24 year old teacher living in Florida who is looking for her bashert.
Origin: Yiddish, “fate, destiny”

ohnosecond (o’ no sekend) noun Computing, informal: a moment in which one realizes that one has made an error, typically by hitting the wrong key. You will very likely experience an ohnosecond supreme if in your haste to complete a thousand word report you hit [delete] instead of [enter] just before the screen goes blank.

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THE LANGUAGE REPORT: The ultimate record of what we’re saying and how we’re saying it
Susie Dent 2003
On loan from library, tiny book, 151 pages

When I was twenty I would have sooner drank pig swill that read a book by any chick named Suzie, but hey, this book is pretty good......not! Actually some of the new words included in Suzie’s little book are quite the “tick” ( sexually attractive ), so I’ll give Suzie’s little book Three Stars. But little Suzie just won’t keep her big mouth shut and opportunes every few pages to "dub" Dubya , which is New Urban Slang Talk for "bashing" Bush. Subtract Two of my pro-offered Three Stars.

Excerpts

“Correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays.” - George Elliot

(Bust this (pay attention) Awaders, a pocket decoder of Rap. )

*To bag up = to have sex
*ballin’ = having it all
*bama = a person who dresses badly; a loser (short for Alabama, meaning someone from the country).
* to bone = to have sex with
*dope = good. janky = bad.
*mack = a sexually successful man; to’ mack on’ a woman is to flirt with her.
*Max = to have great fun
*nutt = good sex
*to turn it out = to have sex

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THE FAITH OF A WRITER: Life, Craft,Art
Joyce Carol Oats 2003
On loan from library

In the seventies I read a short story by Joyce Carrol Oats and found her writings beneath my needs as a reader. Maybe she's gotten better or I've gotten brighter, but anyway, I found this book a great book if you want to gain insight into the thought processes of some of the first tier writers of our time. Now I wonder what other talented artists I have denied the pleasure of entertaining me by my youthful assumptions. Four Bright Stars.

Excerpt

It is a fact that, to that other, nothing ever happens. I, a mortal woman, move through my life with the excited interest of a swimmer in uncharted waters-- my predilections are few, but intense--while she, the other, is a mere shadow, a blur, a figure glimpsed in the corner of the eye. Rumors of JCO come to me third-hand and usually unrecongnizable, arguing, absurdly, for her historical existence. But while writing exists, writers do not--as all writers know. It's true, I see her photographs--my "likeness"--yet it is rarely the same "likeness" from photograph to photograph, and the expression is usually one of faint bewilderment. I acknowledge that I share a name and a face with "JCO" this expression suggests, but this is a mere convenience. Please don't be decieved!

"JCO" is not a person, nor even a personality, but a process that has resulted in a sequence of texts. Some of the texts are retained in my (her) memory. but some have bleached out like pages of print left too long in the sun. Many of the texts have been translated into foreign languges, which is to say into texts at another remove from the primary--sometimes even the authors name, on the dust cover of one of these texts is unrecongnizable by the author. I, on the contrary am fated to be "real"--"physical"--"corporeal"--to "exist in Time". I continue to age year by year, if not hour by hour, while "JCO" the other, remains no fixed age--in spirtual essence, perhaps, forever poised between the fever of idealism and the chill of cynicism, a precocious eighteen years old. Yet, can a process be said to have an age?--an impulse, a strategy, an obsessive tracery, like planetary orbits to which planets, "real" planets, must conform?

No one wants to believe this obvious truth: the "artist" can inhabit any individual, for the individual is irrelevant to "art". (And what is "art"--a firestorm rushing through Time, arising from no visible source and conforming to no principles of logic or causality.) "JCO" occasionally mines, and distorts, my personal history; but only because the history is so close at hand, and then only when some idiosyncrasy about it suits her design, or some curious element of the symbolic. If you, a friend of mine, should appear in her work, have no fear--you won't recongnize yourself, any more than I would recognize you.

It would be misleading to describe our relationship as hostile, in any emotional sense, for she, being bodiless, having no existence, has no emotions: we are more helpfully defined as diamagnetic, the one repulsing the other as magnetic poles repulse each other, so that "JCO" eclipses me, or, and this is less frequent, I eclipse "JCO", depending upon the strenght of my will.

If one or the other of us must be sacrificed, it has always been me.

And so my life continues through the decades...not connected in the slightest with that conspicious other with whom, by acccident, I share a name and likeness. The fact seems self-evident, that I was but the door through which she entered--"it" entered--but any door would have done as well. Does it matter which entrance you use, to enter a walled garden; Once you're inside, and have closed the door?


For once not she, but I, am writing these pages. Or so I believe.

Another excerpt from Joyce Carol Oates's book...

"It's just a turn--and freedom, Matty!"

A niece of Emily Dickinson would recount how the poet one day took her upstairs to her bedroom in the Dickinson house in Amherst, Massachusetts and made a gesture as if locking herself in with her thumb and forefinger closed upon an imaginary key. Just a turn. And freedom.

So with us all, I think. The precious room-of-one's-own. The private place, the sanctuary.To rephrase a famous remark of Robert Frost, our private places are those that, when we seel entry, we are never turned away.


Maybe Joyce Carol Oates referred to the thoughts expressed above by Emily Dickinson, when she wrote...

Does it matter which entrance you use, to enter a walled garden? Once you are inside, and have closed the door.

Book Review

>>MORE<<DAMMED LIES AND STATISTICS: How numbers confuse public issues
_______________________________________________________________ Joel Best 2004

In his Introduction Joel Best is careful to point out that statistical lies are not peculiar to Democrats or Republicans, or, for that matter, any group with a cause that they need to promote, like for example, "free sex". ( I mention "free sex" to point out the questionable statistics conjured up by Alfred Kinsey that sparked a "sexual revolution" back in the sixties which directs our culture to our great detriment even today.) This is a scary book. It is amazing how many misconceptions are operative within the belief system of our culture based upon bad, or imaginary, statistics.

This book is better than his first. I especially like this book because I can selectively quote examples to fit my world view, as below...

*** CBS anchor Dan Rather began his evening newscast on March 5, 2001, by declaring "School shootings in this country have become an epidemic".

In fact careful statitical examination showed that shootings in and around schools had actually gone down. Schools, it seems, were slowly becoming the safest places on Earth for kids to be. Dan, rather, was emotionalizing the occasion of a series of shootings in schools which centered around the tragedy at Columbine, all deplorable, but hardly "epidemic".

Four Stars

BOOK REVIEW

LIGHT & LIFE : An engrossing and enlightening exploration of biological clocks, ancient sun-gods, and creatures that glow in the dark

_____________________________________________________________Michael Gross 2002 153 pages

Stimulating book, chock full of interesting information. Like for example did you know this...(Taken from a section entitled A LENS IS FOR LIFE.

" The eye lens is a rather intriguing tissue. You probably know that cells are rubbed off your skin all the time, to be replaced by new cells growing from the deeper layers of the skin. Similarly, most tissues have a certain turnover rate, replacing dying cells with fresh ones. Not so the eye lens. It keeps growing at a very slow pace from the inside out, but never replaces any of the old cells or even their proteins. Even the very first lens that forms during fetal development will stay intact for a lifetime, possibly for a century. Their metabolism will be all but closed down, so you could call them dead cells, but they still manage to keep their transparency, which is their most important function"

Ever wonder why no matter how fast you go you still can't run over those big black birds who dine on roadkill and wait until the very last moment of your hell-for-leather approach before they leisurely flap off?

Ever wonder why the penis of the human male stands erect each morning?

These questions and much more are answered in this most excellent book. >> FOUR STARS<<

BOOK REVIEW

EVE SPOKE : Human Language and Human Evolution
_____________________________________________ Phillp Lieberman 1999

Nothing radically new in this book but Phillip Lieberman decries Chomsky's kooky ideas throughout. Good - as well he should - Chomsky being the snake oil Sigmund Freud of 20th Century linguistics.

Some ideas found in this 180 page book are...

*** Our kinfolk the Neaderthals most likely spoke in a "proto-language". The reconstruction of the position of the larynx in adult Neanderthals has indicated that the language of Neaderthals was likely a paltry one when compared to we, the wonderful Cro-magnons of today. It seems that their low positioned vocal tracts could probably pronounce all human vowels except (i), (u), and (a). Moreover the Neanderthal could not produce consonants like ((k) and (g).
Big deal, you say, until you remember that frogs find their mates by mating croaks, and in the absence of any physical barriers to effect genetic distinctions, local dialects accomplish the very same thing, i.e. people mostly mate with those who sing a familiar sounding song. "Thus, the sounds of speech in themselves can account for the extinction of the Neanderthals".

*** Spoken words are not spoken nor heard as individual units when spoken within a sentence. Rather, the sentence construct holds the full meaning and our words are percieved as continous flow of water and not as a float of individual boats. Our ideas of phonetics are therefore poorly contrived, and as such they can only be of functional value to us if the sounds we make when expressing ourselves can be rearranged to reflect this continuum of vocal reality.
Forget meter and syllabification and stress, think German, think mega-byte.

(more in a minute)

Big deal, you say, until you remember that frogs find their mates by mating croaks, and in the absence of any physical barriers to effect genetic distinctions, local dialects accomplish the very same thing, i.e. people mostly mate with those who sing a familiar sounding song. "Thus, the sounds of speech in themselves can account for the extinction of the Neanderthals".

huh?

___________________ HUH? ___________________

Please excuse me etaoin, for posting a paragraph so tightly written. But honestly, I didn't think anyone was listening. Maybe this expansion will render it coherent...

Big deal, you say, until you remember that frogs find their mates by mating croaks,

Most frogs find other frogs in fogs by sounding croaks peculiar to a specific bog or even specific to the particular frog to which he hopes to mate.

(Forgive me etaoin, apparently I am my own whore and can't help amusing only me. Forgive me. I think it's best hereafter that I quote only from the book.)

"Ethologists have noted that songbirds literally sing for their partners. Birdsongs serve as "genetic isolating mechanisms". Frogs find their mates by their less than melodic croaks."


...and in the absence of any physical barriers to effect genetic distinctions, local dialects accomplish the very same thing, i.e. people mostly mate with those who sing a familiar sounding song.

I think I can handle this...
Like frogs and birds people tend to mate with those who talk as they do. Even when no mountains or deep waters are in place to accomplish genetic divergence by isolating the gene pool, a beginning dialect establishes boundaries that, outside of other factors, increases genetic divergence exponentially with the degree of semantic divergence.

For example, my dear mother did not want her two boys to join the US army, not because she was afraid that we might get killed in a war -worse - she was afraid that we might be sent up north where we might marry a fast talking yankee.



"Thus, the sounds of speech in themselves can account for the extinction of the Neanderthals".

Again, the book...

"Over the course of time even a slight advantage in coping with nature would have led to the increase of our human ancestors and a struggle available resources. That is the pattern commonly observed for species competing in the same ecological niche. Again, given the isolating effects of dialect, a small difference in lingistic and/or cognitive ability, operating over many generations, could have resulted in the Neaderthal extinction."

"Thus, the sounds of speech in themselves can account for the extinction of the Neanderthals".

Again, the book...

"Over the course of time even a slight advantage in coping with nature would have led to the increase of our human ancestors and a struggle available resources. That is the pattern commonly observed for species competing in the same ecological niche. Again, given the isolating effects of dialect, a small difference in lingistic and/or cognitive ability, operating over many generations, could have resulted in the Neaderthal extinction."

no apologies, necessary, m.

I was just curious as to how the author had decided that it was speech, or lack thereof, that would account for extinction. he had stated that Neanderthals had speech, though not as flexible as current homo sapiens, and then proceeded to say their lack of it caused their demise. seems incongruous to me. and the frog example didn't seem to support his idea. what would stop the Neanderthals from having their own dialects?

however, your recent quote, adding in differences in cognitive abilities begins to make more sense; also, territorial struggles with other sapient species with more advanced language skills, and the thesis is stronger.

anyway, it all deserves a bit more thought.