Lives of Others redux

Hey, I know you guys are focused on turkey, the Saints and that looming Chem final.... but one entry on the movie from two classes? I don't see a lot of movies in the future in this class unless I see some evidence of cognitive engagement

Conundrums of Culture

"It was he who most forcibly planted the idea that culture is what sets people free from their nature."

I found this article very interesting because it controdicted my research I had done for my research paper. In multiple books by Jane Goodall it was stated that chimpanzees, depending on where they are living, actually have differeing cultural customs. For instance one group of chimpanzees may make sitting cushions out of large leaves, but another cultural group have not been observed doing the same. This may show us that culture is just not a human behavior, but may have been around far longer than humans existed.

Courtney Timms

Language

The language readings were all very interesting. The video in class tried to explain the similarities in languages. It showed that most languages had words or spellings in common,eventhough the countries are not close together.
One of the readings explained the way we classify words. In english, a chair is associated with a piece of furnature. In African languages it would go with power, such as a throne.Animals are classified by their funtion and in english they are classified by age.Language is classified in the way we look at things.

The Lives of Others

Entry from "WMT" copied to Blog

Hello, My blog "expired". I enjoyed the film very much. As I told Kai it ties in nicely with human/nature course. The spy, whose name eludes me, could well have been nurtured to be an a**hole, but when he fell in love with the girl who was in love with the playwright, who was viewed as the enemy, had a change of heart, He became his true self. In other words; his true nature was to be the person he was after the change of heart. The film was a beautiful work of art. I enjoy foreign films, however I find them sometimes hard to follow as I am always listening as force of habit. I try to see how many words I can recognize and I always enjoy set design, such as clothing, cityscapes (I did notice all the graffiti on the walls of mid 18th. century period buildings, it looked fresh and I wonder if it was staged or real.) I took personal note of the flats. One was very posh but homey and the other was very rudimentary and ugly. These things are easy to pay attention to in English films but more difficult in other languages so perhaps I missed a few things.

The Lives of Others

I'd like to encourage commentary and discussion of the film "The Lives of Others." I have thoughts and opinions of course, but I'll keep them to myself for the moment so as not to take up too much of the oxygen. If you weren't able to see it or missed parts or want to share, it should be in the video rental stores, the public library as well as PSU's.
A reminder of the names of the characters for you to refer to.

Gerd Wiesler- the Stasi man in grey who listens and watches
Anton Grubitz: Wiesler's boss
Georg Dreyman: the writer
Christina Maria Sieland: the actress
Minister Bruno Hempf: the sleazeball
Albert Jerska: blacklisted director, committed suicide
Paul Hauser: the journalist friend of Dreyman who berated him for being "in bed with the bosses."

How to Talk about the World

Reading response

While reading How to Talk about the World, by Peter Farb, I though that it was interesting that our brain automatically categorizes things. Because we have a limited space for obtaining knowledge it makes me wonder how large our capacity to learn is. And if their was no limit on the information we could retain how would that affect humans and our environment. Cultures generalize information differently all over the world, making exact translations from one language to another pretty much impossible. If we had a more standardized knowledge of basic information communication from one culture to the next could be much smoother. Because their is such a wide range of cultural groups around the world that is pretty much impossible. 

Muriel Smith 

Aitchison- Language

The article about language and how there are many biological clues on how we are pre-programmed to learn and deal with language and how such traits have evolved to get to our current point, was something that I found very interesting. The author went on to discuss many of our biological human aspects and how they may relate and have an influence on our ability to learn, sustain and advance something as complicated and important as language. The part that talked about how it isn't surprising if we only could speak in a few word bursts, but the fact that we can plan and change what we are about to say while we are already saying something is an aspect to our language capabilities that puzzles many researchers in the field but is undoubtedly one of the defining characteristics when it comes to our use of language as a tool of verbal communication.

-Chris L.