A sign is never just a sign. The whole purpose of a sign is that it signifies something. Of all the things to call meaningless, why choose an object that has no other purpose than conveying meaning?
Doctoral program incorporate many elements of apprenticeship. PhD candidates teach conference sections, grade papers and assist with research as part of their instruction.
We have a similar issue at Reed. It's compounded by the fact that a lot of us are hippies who never wash their dreadlocks. Weed+sweat+the stench of anxiety= >:(
I wouldn't want that. If someone gives me comments on a paper, I want to be able to talk about them, to ask for clarification if I need it. Also, if the person who grades papers isn't the same person who teaches the conference or the discussion session (like TAs do), then you might be getting contradictory advice.
I think there may be more going on with cats than meets the eye. My brother's cat will eat jam. Just stick his head in the jar when someone's trying to make a sandwich. Then they have to wash him.
This is pretty old news. I'm not sure why it's coming up now. The reason he chose Klingon was that Klingon was developed specifically to defy all of Noam Chomsky's ideas of what is possible in a language. After it was developed, Chomsky had to revise his rules to say they only applied to natural language. Chomskian generativist linguists believe that the consistencies between the natural languages of the world exist because of structures in the human mind/brain. That is, we are only able to learn and fluently use languages that conform to certain rules. Since Klingon breaks all of these rules, the question of whether it's possible to learn Klingon as a native language is incredibly interesting. I don't think there's anything abusive or dangerous in this at all. The child's mother spoke English to him, and he grew up speaking English natively. He learned some Klingon, but then around the age of five simply refused to use it to communicate anymore. As a linguistic anthropologist, I take this to mean that he stopped using it because nobody but his father spoke it, and he may have picked up that it was stigmatized. But my formalist linguist friend thinks it means that Klingon really is impossible to learn as a native language and Chomsky was right. So, nothing resolved there, but it was an interesting experiment.
The reason he chose Klingon was that Klingon was developed specifically to defy all of Noam Chomsky's ideas of what is possible in a language. After it was developed, Chomsky had to revise his rules to say they only applied to natural language.
Chomskian generativist linguists believe that the consistencies between the natural languages of the world exist because of structures in the human mind/brain. That is, we are only able to learn and fluently use languages that conform to certain rules. Since Klingon breaks all of these rules, the question of whether it's possible to learn Klingon as a native language is incredibly interesting.
I don't think there's anything abusive or dangerous in this at all. The child's mother spoke English to him, and he grew up speaking English natively. He learned some Klingon, but then around the age of five simply refused to use it to communicate anymore. As a linguistic anthropologist, I take this to mean that he stopped using it because nobody but his father spoke it, and he may have picked up that it was stigmatized. But my formalist linguist friend thinks it means that Klingon really is impossible to learn as a native language and Chomsky was right.
So, nothing resolved there, but it was an interesting experiment.