Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

I have read many books written in English about teaching English to non-native speakers. This book is the first I've seen written in English about teaching other languages (Spanish, French) to non-native speakers. I'm curious what differences there might be in methodology.

"And this is a direct result of additional nerve control of the intercostal muscles and diaphragm, enabling voluntary control [of breathing] and hence speech."

"Species with sophisticated communication systems ... have broadcast capacities that match reception capabilities."

For instance, recent data suggests that in the United States adult males are, on average, just 8 per cent heavier than adult females and just 4 per cent taller" - decline of manual labour?

"This is likely to be an adaptation to eating cooked meat for well over a million years" - cookery preceded language?

"Signs had to also come to refer to other signs, which gives rise to the emergence of grammar" - this seems a more plausible basis for defining 'grammar' than the idea of 'rules' of language use. But 'grammar' is actually more than one thing.

"Cooperative intelligence entailed the development of more complex symbolic activities, leading to the development of a conventional system of signs" - the evolution of tongues and fingers would seem to be as important and the evolution of brains.

"...Homo heidelbergensis may have been the first human species to be able tp bring down large game through collaborative hunting." - so don't we have to explain we language didn't evolve for wolves, lions, killer whales etc.?

"...around 98 per cent of our DNA, we now know, is shared with chimpanzees." - what is the statistical equivalent of a cliché? I only 50% of my DNA with my mum, but I look a lot more like her than a chimpanzee. To be filed with we only use 10% of our brains.

But it is only with the emergence of a full-fledged grammar that [it] has become possible [for language to evoke a stream of consciousness] - first lines of Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man?

"we know the distinct meanings associated with '-er' in order to be able to successfully use it in the range of everyday contexts with which we are familiar" - No, we discover the meanings of '-er' from the contexts in which it is used.

"..it seems incontrovertible that language does have an indigenous repository of meanings, ones that are qualitatively distinct from those in the conceptual system," - There is also a reflexivity here that is overlooked; the use of purely abstract terms like 'justice' or 'democracy' gives rise to analogue concepts. Could this be one definition of 'essentially-contestable concept'?

"Words, and other units of language, provide instructions as to to how simulations should be constructed: they provide the how to the what of the conceptual system." - I guess 'combinations of units of language' would be more accurate.

"So, now that we've seen the way in which representations conveyed by the grammatical system of a language are qualitatively different from analogue representations" - Ok, so I need to go over that again

"We've fought so long and hard to carve out a little space for ourselves in society, to be able to make our voices heard, and here are these men pretending to be women"

"...sex trumps politics, common sense and better judgement" - true story

"...its reliance not on God or economics but on the principle of love" - Rachel Cusk may have something important to say about marriage, but it's hard to find out what.

"A central design feature of language is that it divides features of language into two systems: the lexical and grammatical subsystems" - surprised to see this Chomskyite assumption, and then he goes on to talk about word classes, are words a central feature of languages or of literacy?

"Of course, language is not necessary to combine concepts - babies can perform rudimentary arithmetic before they acquire their mother tongue"

"After 1856, the numbers of people emigrating to Kansas dwindled as terrorism took hold."

"...in 1846, Macaulay conjured up a vision where Britain, fuelled by the foodstuffs of the world, concentrated on flooding the globe with its manufactures..." - still a dream of the Brexiteers?

"These lands once belonged to the Kiowas and the Crows, but we [the Lakota Sioux] whipped those nations out of them, and this we do what the white men do when they want land of the Indians"

"After disease, the biggest cause of death on the road [to California] was mishandling weapons" - Same old, same old.

"The coaches, freighters and wagons that traversed [the American West] wrre far superior in point of comfort and robustness of those used to cross the desert at Suez, in India or in southern Africa."

"Gold's greatest effect was psychological...it was the preeminent symbol of the increasing prosperity of the world...It added up to the single most important ingredient for rapid growth - unbridled confidence"

"The export trade from America [to Australia] had been worth a paltry $3,670 in 1851: two years later it was $8.5 million" - evidence that the UK won't necessarily be the chief beneficiary of post Brexit free-trading.

"San Francisco contained fewer souls than Bendigo and Ballarat in their pomp." - It is a triumph of American boosterism, that I haven't even heard of the Victoria gold rush until now.

"When [Uncle Tom's Cabin] was published as a book it sold 300,000 copies in the States but more than a million in Britain in its first year. "

"All despots fear free trade, because the liberty of commerce is the great vehicle of political liberty" - So Kossuth was a free-trader too. I suppose it was fashionable at the time.

'This allows us to create and innovate, in the way that we use language'