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Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts

25 April 2016

#Shakespeare400


You probably noticed a bit of a hoo-hah at the weekend surrounding the 400th deathiversary of someone called William Shakespeare. We marked the day with a video about 10 unsolved Shakespearean terms over on YouTube and a missing words quiz here on the HH blog, while over on Twitter we were ridiculously busy bombarding you with half-hourly tweets about the great man himself all day Saturday. And apologies to all non-Shakespeare fans out there, but we’re going to do the same again now.

There were quite a few calls over on Twitter for us to collate all our Shakespeare facts in one place. And as ever, your wish is our command. So from a Shakespearean shipwreck to a man extinguishing his trousers with beer, here is our #Shakespeare400 list in full:

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15 February 2016

The McGurk Effect

This week on the @HaggardHawks YouTube channel, we’ve something a little different for you. Instead of another of the Top 10 videos that we’ve been posting so far (normal service will be resumed on those on Thursday, incidentally) today we’ve a new video looking at one of the most bizarre linguistic phenomena discovered in recent decades. So, goggles and lab coats at the ready people, we’re getting experimental…



The McGurk Effect was discovered in 1976 by the British psychologist and linguist Harry McGurk. An expert in child language acquisition, McGurk reportedly discovered his “effect” entirely by accident when, during preparation of a separate language experiment, he happened to replay the audio of one phoneme (language sound) over video of another. And the result was—well, something very unusual indeed.

(FYI, if you haven’t watched the video yet, now would be a good time to do so. Otherwise, SPOILER ALERT!)

As explained in the video, as much as we might think of speech perception as being a purely auditory, sound-based process, the McGurk Effect neatly proves that there is in fact just as much (if not more) visual information being analysed—it’s just that it all happens so quickly and automatically, that we’re unaware of it happening. 

 But if the information being provided by our eyes and our ears don’t match, then our brain doesn’t quite know what to do. So watching a video of someone saying far while hearing audio of them saying bar leads to some considerable confusion.

When this happens, in some cases the brain ignores the auditory information entirely and instead trusts the information being provided by the eyes without question—if that’s you, then watching the tape in the YouTube video, you’ll be convinced that the fourth word was far. 

 In other cases, however, the brain mixes the two conflicting streams of information together, thereby convincing itself that what it’s seeing and hearing is, in fact, neither of the things that it’s actually seeing or hearing—and if that’s you, then like our guinea pig Anthony in the video, you probably thought the fourth worth on the tape was var rather than far. Likewise, in McGurk’s original experiment, he found that playing the sound ba-ba over a tape of someone saying ga-ga led to him interpreting it as da-da.

So what does all this prove? Well, the McGurk Effect demonstrates just how much visual information is utilised by our brains while we’re processing speech, and how quickly our brains are to ignore auditory information—which we might think of as the cornerstone of speech perception—in favour of visual information. This has all kinds of implications on how we acquire language in the first place, what kind of sensory hierarchy must be going on in our brains, and what our brains have to do when this process is disrupted by, for instance, blindness, deafness, or trauma to the language-processing part of the brain. And the more we understand about that, the better we’ll become at fixing it when it goes wrong.

 For more information on the McGurk Effect, you can take a look at McGurk’s original 1976 paper, Hearing Lips and Seeing Voices, here—or take a look at another version of this experiment on YouTube, courtesy of the BBC’s Horizon. 




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12 November 2015

Peripatetic

A pretty perfect P-word popped up on Haggard Hawks the other day:
Which raised this perceptively prompt post-script:
Actually, it’s the other way around. According to the OED (which labels this an “obsolete nonse-word”) the poet Robert Southey coined the word peripateticate in 1793, basing it on the much earlier fifteenth century adjective peripatetic. 

Nowadays of course you’re most likely to come across the word peripatetic in reference to itinerant or part-time jobs (and in particularly teaching positions) that involve moving from one location to another. But originally it was a noun: spelled with a capital P, a Peripatetic is a follower or advocate of the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. So how the devil are these two meanings connected?

Etymologically, peripatetic brings together two Greek roots: peri, meaning “around” or “about” (as in perimeter and periphery), and pateo, a Greek verb meaning “to walk”, “tread”, or “trample” (which is a distant relative of the word path). So peripatetic literally means “walking around,” and hence peripateticate means “to walk about on foot”.

As for Aristotle, well, if there’s one thing he liked it was a good old cogitate. And what better to do while you’re quietly cogitating to yourself than to wander around a beautiful classical Greek garden, like that at Aristotle’s Lyceum?


The Lyceum: Good for cogitating, less good if it rains
At The Lyceum—the sports-ground-cum-scholarly-gymnasium used as a meeting point and debating area—Aristotle reportedly had a habit of horbgorbling his way around the porticos, corridors, and gardens while he taught his lessons and debated with students, which earned him and his followers the nickname Peripatetikos (literally “given to walking about”). And so when the word Peripatetic first appeared in English in the mid-1400s, it referred exclusively to Aristotelian beliefs and techniques.

Later writers—Southey included—eventually commandeered this word, and used it in more literal senses to mean “a person who wanders”, “an itinerant peddler”, and ultimately “someone who works in various locations”. Not only that, but the plural peripatetics can been used to mean “movements”, “journeys”, or “wanderings”, and Charles Dickens being Charles Dickens, he of course had to go one better and use it in a figurative sense to mean “rambling” or “long-winded”, as he did in Our Mutual Friend in 1865.

But now it’s time to participate in a prompt peripatetication of my own. Aristotle would be pleased as punch. 
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7 March 2015

Ampersand

This:

is called an ampersand. It’s derived from a handwritten combination of the letters E and T, as in et, the Latin word for “and”. You might have already known that. But whether you did or you didn’t, the fact is that the swirly thing you usually call an “and sign” actually has a name. And if it has a name, then there’s a reason for it having that name. Which is where we come in.

Up until as recently as the mid 1900s, it was standard practice when reciting the alphabet to use the Latin phrase per se (literally “by itself”) to differentiate between individual letters of the alphabet—like A, I, and O—and single-character homographic words—like a, I and O.

So the letter A would be read as “A per se A”, to ensure it was distinguished from the indefinite article a. The letter I, similarly, would be “I per se I” to differentiate it from the pronoun I. And the letter O would be “O per se O” to differentiate it from the interjection O!

But because it was just another character representing just another unit of the English language, the symbol & was also once considered a letter of the alphabet, and was included after Z in twenty-seventh place. And so to differentiate & from the conjunction and, the alphabet once ended with a final “X, Y, Z, and & per se &”.


Eyetests were a lot easier in the 1920s

 Sometime in the early nineteenth century, this “and per se and” ran together into a single word, and, eventually, the name ampersand was born. 

 & that’s that. 

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26 February 2015

Trivia

One thing that HaggardHawks deals with quite a lot—all the time, in fact—is trivia. Random bits of throwaway information. Miscellaneous facts. 

Dissect the word trivia under an etymological microscope and you’ll find two fairly obvious Latin roots: tri-, taken from the Latin for “three” (as in “triangle”), and -via, the Latin word for “road” or “way” (as in “you can only get into town via the diversion at the end of the high street that takes you two miles out your way”). So how did a word that apparently means something like “three roads” come to imply “random information”? 

The answer lies in the early Middle Ages with a little-known scholar named Martianus Minneus Felix Capella, born in Roman north Africa more than 1500 years ago. As well as having a name that sounds like a magic spell, Capella was one of the first proponents of a classical system of learning called the Seven Liberal Arts—seven fundamental subjects he considered the cornerstones of a good education.



The pilot of Celebrity Squares was a complete failure

Capella’s work continued to be studied and discussed long after his death, until eventually the idea of the Seven Liberal Arts had become a well-established part of Western education. Although precisely what these seven subjects were changed a bit over time, by the Early Modern period the complete set was widely understood to be arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music, grammar, rhetoric and logic.

The first four of these—arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music—were considered the more worthwhile ‘mathematical sciences’, dealing with concepts of quantity and magnitude, and so were set apart from the others as a separate higher tier of learning known as the quadrivium, a play on the Latin word for a crossroads. The remaining three—grammar, rhetoric and logic—comprised a lower tier of learning, dealing purely with matters of prose and language. And in contrast, it became known as the trivium, the Latin word for a place where three (rather than four) roads meet.

Because this trivium was considered the less important of the two, by the late nineteenth century its name—or rather, its plural trivia—had come to be used of less important knowledge in general, and eventually any random, throwaway facts or pieces of information. 

Precisely like this one.




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