Language is happy? That’s nice!
“The scientists analyzed billions of words from Twitter, a half-century of music lyrics, 20 years of The New York Times, and millions of books going back to 1520. After finding the 10,222 most frequently used English words from these four sources, they asked a group of volunteers to rate the emotional temperature of these words…. There was an overwhelming preponderance of happier words among the top 5,000 words in each of the four sources.”—
Scientists find English is an overwhelmingly positive language.
Further reading: Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.
(via curiositycounts)
An interesting factoid from a study.
I’ve never really been personally that interested in the philosophy of language and mind, which is really too bad because if I was I would have taken a course or two with Daniel Dennett, who was (one of) the bigshot(s) in my University’s Philosophy department.
The funny thing is, since college I’ve become slightly more interested in the philosophy of language pretty much solely due to a really, really great episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
The episode is called “Darmok”, season 5, episode 2. In it, Picard is sent to meet with a race of people with which communication has always been impossible because their language is based entirely on cultural reference to emotions, behaviors, or motivations that their own cultural heroes or myths embody from their past. It’s really quite fascinating; while the Enterprise’s universal translators can translate the words themselves into English, their meaning is not carried. They say things like “Temba, his arms wide,” or “The river Tanak, in winter,” which we understand as phrases but which we do not understand in meaning unless we know why Temba’s arms were held wide or what the river Tanak was actually like in winter time.
I also have a book on the Philosophy of Star Trek, in which one of the essays is a very deep look at the philosophical ramifications of this one episode. It was already one of my favorite sci-fi episodes of all time and is a perfect example of my definition of quality science fiction (as explained in my previous post here), but reading this essay made me appreciate it even more.
……annnnnd in a sad turn of events, I can’t find the book on my shelf to tell you all the name of the essay and who wrote it. It might be at my parents’ house in CT with the rest of my book collection (I live in NYC but I go back and forth a lot. I work with my mom’s business). When I find it, I’ll probably re-read the article and post more about it again.
Either way, you don’t need to read the essay to appreciate the excellent Star Trek TNG episode. They’re all available for streaming on Netflix. :)
