A bit of News, plus "Fighting Received Wisdom"

Well, my friends.  I have finally made a decision about next year, and officially accepted the offer to pursue the MA in Sociology starting this coming Fall.  I don't have much more detail than this for now.  Maybe once the powers-that-be processed my acceptance, I will hear more from them regarding logistics and so on.

My sense is that the Fall will be online once again.  I just don't see this Covid shit stopping in its tracks.  Perhaps we will all get vaccinated by then (I think I am tentatively getting mine some time June-July, but who knows).  But even then, who's to say it will do the trick?  UOttawa has announced that summer school will be 100% online.  I think they will play it safe and do the same for the Fall.  We shall see.

Not for it, of course.  This online shit is getting on my nerves.  I think learning suffers, and there's no replacing in-person classes (assuming the prof is not a total ass or an absolute bore).  Such is life, eh?  Again, look at the bright side, I suppose.

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I was watching a video about this particular group of people who speak "Piraha."  It's only spoken by 400 people or so.  It will probably die away in a few decades.  Sadly.  But what's interesting is that these folks can whistle the language to each other.  They can hum the language.  They can also speak it in the normal way.  Pretty cool, eh?  Also, they have no numbers.  No past or future tense.  And a lot of these interesting stuff.

Here's the link to the video if you are interested.

 

It's really cool.  But you know, the reason I share this is not that it's interesting.  The researcher who "discovered" this language also challenged one of the linguistic universals.  

 You may have heard of Noam Chomsky.  Well, he's a god in linguistics, and many have staked their whole careers on everything he says.  Anyway, one of his universals (i.e. every language has this) is that languages have recursions.  By recursion, think: "I feel that he feels that I feel that he feels that I feel that he feels that I feel that he is a shit."  Got it? 

OK.  Well, according to the research in the video, this Piraha language has NO recursion.  Thus, recursion is NOT a universal!

OMG, alarm bells ring everywhere.  Someone is challenging Chomsky!  How impertinent!  And they all ganged up on this researcher (Dan), badmouthed him, and even managed to get the authorities to ban him from visiting the tribe again! What a bunch of god damn motherfuckers!

You know, though, that these things happen.  It's just human nature.  Many moons ago, when doing my doctoral dissertation, I had data to show that the conventional way marketers measure ethnic identity was bogus.  As in unreliable and thus invalid.  Wrote papers about it and all that.  Guess what?  It has NEVER EVER been picked up and pursued or even mentioned by anyone!  Why?  The guy I said was wrong was a big name dude from a big name school who published regularly in big name journals.  You got the picture?  I was in fact lucky no one trashed my work!  Maybe they took one look at me and said, let's not piss him off.  Who knows.

The moral of the story?  If you dare to rock the boat, be prepared to deal with the shit that will come your way.  People are just assholes, plain and simple.