WorldView Good Reads: Off the Press for September 2018
Published: September 25, 2018
Here are good reads from around the globe that have caught our attention.
1. How do bilingual people process knowledge? Laura Muscalu, lecturer in the Department of Psychology at Ithaca College, tried to answer this question in a study published by Cambridge University Press. Cody Taylor of The Ithacan spoke to Muscalu about her study, the tests she performed and why these results are important in understanding how bilingual people process language.
2. Classifying languages is about politics as much as linguistics. “A language,” linguist Max Weinreich once said, “is a dialect with an army and a navy.” How do we know what is a language and what is a dialect? Those who tally the world’s languages are either “lumpers,” who treat mutually incomprehensible tongues as single languages, or “splitters,” who focus on the differences. The Economist tells us about “lumper-splitter” controversies from around the world, from the Nordic countries and the Balkans to South Asia and beyond.
3. Community Confusion. The Internet connects us to hundreds, thousands, even millions of people, and yet we feel more isolated than ever. One in four Americans say they have zero friends to confide in. Radha Agrawal, co-founder of the Daybreaker dance movement, calls it "community confusion." Where are our people? Radha offers some answers in Belong, an energetic guide to discovering where and with whom you fit.
4. The Mystery of People Who Speak Dozens of Languages. Luis Miguel Rojas-Berscia is a baby-faced twenty-seven-year-old Peruvian who has a command of twenty-two living languages and six classical or endangered languages. What can he and other "hyperpolyglots" teach the rest of us? Judith Thurman talks to Rojas-Berscia and others like him to find out.
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