[geeks] New Tech Schools: Digital Harbor in Baltimore

[Sandwich Maker]

" From: Sridhar Ayengar <ploopster at gmail.com>
" 
" Sandwich Maker wrote:
" > " The linguist in question is Finnish, and once told me (about Hungarian)
" > " something like "the rhythms and lilt are dead ringers for Finnish - if
" > " I don't listen to it, it sounds like Finnish, but if I pay attention, I
" > " can't make out a word of it".  A rather disorienting experience,
" > " apparently.
" > 
" > it would sure freak me out.
" 
" I had an interesting acid trip once, where I could still easily 
" understand the grammar and syntax of English, but I no longer could 
" understand any of the words.  (vocabulary -> 0)  I could really only 
" think in my native language, Tamil.  With great concentration, I 
" reconstructed the word "friend" in my head in English, and as I kept 
" concentrating, more and more of my vocabulary came back.  It was an 
" interesting experience to be sure.

fascinating!  iirc these parts of language are physically in different
places - broca's ares, wernicke's area, others?

and you'd think the brain would use the same areas for generation and
parsing of sentences, right?  not so, apparently.

it is possible to dysfunction so that you can understand language but
not speak it, and vice versa.  it is also possible to lose just syntax,
so that sentences like 'the lion attacked the tiger' and 'the lion was
attacked by the tiger' sound the same.

i had a trip once where all speech sounded like uninflected singing.
that was rather pleasant...
________________________________________________________________________
Andrew Hay                                  the genius nature
internet rambler                            is to see what all have seen
adh at an.bradford.ma.us                       and think what none thought