i think people in the middle ages acutally did know how to make photorealistic drawings they just chose not to because it’s funnier to draw some fucked up creature
they actually did make photorealistic drawings things just looked different back then
People who are blind from birth will gesture when they speak. I always like pointing out this fact when I teach classes on gesture, because it gives us an an interesting perspective on how we learn and use gestures. Until now I’ve mostly cited a 1998 paper from Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow that analysed the gestures and speech of young blind people. Not only do blind people gesture, but the frequency and types of gestures they use does not appear to differ greatly from how sighted people gesture. If people learn gesture without ever seeing a gesture (and, most likely, never being shown), then there must be something about learning a language that means you get gestures as a bonus.
Blind people will even gesture when talking to other blind people, and sighted people will gesture when speaking on the phone - so we know that people don’t only gesture when they speak to someone who can see their gestures.
Earlier this year a new paper came out that adds to this story. Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow looked at the gestures of blind speakers of Turkish and English, to see if the *way* they gestured was different to sighted speakers of those languages. Some of the sighted speakers were blindfolded and others left able to see their conversation partner.
Turkish and English were chosen, because it has already been established that speakers of those languages consistently gesture differently when talking about videos of items moving. English speakers will be more likely to show the manner (e.g. ‘rolling’ or bouncing’) and trajectory (e.g. ‘left to right’, ‘downwards’) together in one gesture, and Turkish speakers will show these features as two separate gestures. This reflects the fact that English ‘roll down’ is one verbal clause, while in Turkish the equivalent would be yuvarlanarak iniyor, which translates as two verbs ‘rolling descending’.
Since we know that blind people do gesture, Özçalışkan’s team wanted to figure out if they gestured like other speakers of their language. Did the blind Turkish speakers separate the manner and trajectory of their gestures like their verbs? Did English speakers combine them? Of course, the standard methodology of showing videos wouldn’t work with blind participants, so the researchers built three dimensional models of events for people to feel before they discussed them.
The results showed that blind Turkish speakers gesture like their sighted counterparts, and the same for English speakers. All Turkish speakers gestured significantly differently from all English speakers, regardless of sightedness. This means that these particular gestural patterns are something that’s deeply linked to the grammatical properties of a language, and not something that we learn from looking at other speakers.
References
Jana M. Iverson & Susan Goldin-Meadow. 1998. Why people gesture when they speak. Nature, 396(6708), 228-228.
Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow. 2016. Is Seeing Gesture Necessary to Gesture
Like a Native Speaker?
Psychological Science
27(5) 737–747.
Asli Ozyurek & Sotaro Kita. 1999. Expressing manner and path in English and Turkish:
Differences in speech, gesture, and conceptualization. In Twenty-first Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 507-512). Erlbaum.
Ok, this is just *super cool*.
And implies that gestures have grammar. I mean. Holy. Shit.
That would also imply language development early in the species could have been not just a mouth / lip / tongue thing but also a body language thing, or that body language (literally) may predate it. Just - fucking *cool*.
That makes sense, since body language is a lot older than spoken language.
Let this be our July 2021 reminder that Hobby Lobby stays a truly dangerous, disgusting company and you’d do well to get your craft supplies from just about anywhere else.
They also announced recently that they would no longer carry Halloween items because it sends an un-Christian message, and that decision obviously doesn’t hurt or inconvenience anybody, but it’s eye-opening because Halloween decor, crafts and party supplies outsell those of any other holiday, season or even, yes even Christmas, so think how hardcore a big corporate brand has to be to put such a dated, fringe conviction over their largest profit season.
I knew someone who used to work at Hobby Lobby who told me a lot of the higher ups at her store and several of the other local stores were still die hard believers in that bullshit Mark of the Beast conspiracy about retail barcodes, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that had something to do with that policy.
Hobby Lobby purchased thousands of ancient artifacts smuggled out of modern-day Iraq via the United Arab Emirates and Israel in 2010 and 2011, attorneys for the Eastern District of New York announced on Wednesday. As part of a settlement, the American craft-supply mega-chain will pay $3 million and the U.S. government will seize the illicit artifacts. Technically, the defendants in the civil-forfeiture action are the objects themselves, yielding an incredible case name: The United States of America v. Approximately Four Hundred Fifty (450) Ancient Cuneiform Tablets; and Approximately Three Thousand (3,000) Ancient-Clay Bullae.
In 2010, Steve Green, the Hobby Lobby corporation president, travelled to the UAE to inspect a shipment of cultural material; and despite warnings from an expert in cultural property that the objects in question were likely from looted archaeological sites in Iraq,executed a contract to purchase 5,548 artefacts for $1.6 million. From 2010 to 2011, dealers in the UAE and Israel shipped parcels of looted cultural material to three different corporate Hobby Lobby addresses in the US. Each shipment of cultural material was sent without the required customs documentation and under shipping labels which falsely declared that the cuneiform tablets and other cultural property were “ceramic tiles,” “ tile samples,” and “hand made [sic] clay tiles (sample) manufactured in Turkey”.
Yeah, that wasn’t an accident. He was smuggling that shit. Poorly. Because he was caught in 2011 and that incredible case up there happened in 2017.
just can’t vibe with the kind of feminism that implies or states outright that the reason men mistreat women is because of some insurmountable biological difference rather than social phenomena. you’re not explaining or saying anything interesting about misogyny you’re just naturalizing it
