The Simian Tongue
Title | The Simian Tongue PDF eBook |
Author | Gregory Radick |
Publisher | University of Chicago Press |
Total Pages | 593 |
Release | 2007 |
Genre | Science |
ISBN | 0226702243 |
Yet for most of the next century, the simian tongue and the means for its study existed at the scientific periphery.
The Simian Tongue. [Pt. II].
Title | The Simian Tongue. [Pt. II]. PDF eBook |
Author | Richard Lynch Garner |
Publisher | |
Total Pages | 7 |
Release | 18?? |
Genre | |
ISBN |
The Simian Tongue
Title | The Simian Tongue PDF eBook |
Author | Gregory Radick |
Publisher | University of Chicago Press |
Total Pages | 593 |
Release | 2009-01-23 |
Genre | Science |
ISBN | 0226835944 |
In the early 1890s the theory of evolution gained an unexpected ally: the Edison phonograph. An amateur scientist used the new machine—one of the technological wonders of the age—to record monkey calls, play them back to the monkeys, and watch their reactions. From these soon-famous experiments he judged that he had discovered “the simian tongue,” made up of words he was beginning to translate, and containing the rudiments from which human language evolved. Yet for most of the next century, the simian tongue and the means for its study existed at the scientific periphery. Both returned to great acclaim only in the early 1980s, after a team of ethologists announced that experimental playback showed certain African monkeys to have rudimentarily meaningful calls. Drawing on newly discovered archival sources and interviews with key scientists, Gregory Radick here reconstructs the remarkable trajectory of a technique invented and reinvented to listen in on primate communication. Richly documented and powerfully argued, The Simian Tongue charts the scientific controversies over the evolution of language from Darwin’s day to our own, resurrecting the forgotten debts of psychology, anthropology, and other behavioral sciences to the Victorian debate about the animal roots of human language.
What It Means to be Human
Title | What It Means to be Human PDF eBook |
Author | Joanna Bourke |
Publisher | Catapult |
Total Pages | 481 |
Release | 2013-07-23 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 1619021676 |
In 1872, a woman known only as "An Earnest Englishwoman" published a letter titled "Are Women Animals?" in which she protested against the fact that women were not treated as fully human. In fact, their status was worse than that of animals: regulations prohibiting cruelty against dogs, horses, and cattle were significantly more punitive than laws against cruelty to women. The Earnest Englishwoman's heartfelt cry was for women to "become–animal" in order to gain the status that they were denied on the grounds that they were not part of "mankind." In this fascinating account, Joanna Bourke addresses the profound question of what it means to be "human" rather than "animal." How are people excluded from political personhood? How does one become entitled to rights? The distinction between the two concepts is a blurred line, permanently under construction. If the Earnest Englishwoman had been capable of looking 100 years into the future, she might have wondered about the human status of chimeras, or the ethics of stem cell research. Political disclosures and scientific advances have been re–locating the human–animal border at an alarming speed. In this meticulously researched, illuminating book, Bourke explores the legacy of more than two centuries, and looks forward into what the future might hold for humans, women, and animals.
Origin Of Language
Title | Origin Of Language PDF eBook |
Author | Roy Harris |
Publisher | A&C Black |
Total Pages | 350 |
Release | 1996-01-01 |
Genre | Language Arts & Disciplines |
ISBN | 9781855064386 |
Public debate about language in the English-speaking world during the nineteenth century turned on the issue of how language began. The notion that language was a divine gift to humanity, not shared by lower creatures, was supported by the Biblical accounts of Adam naming the animals and of the Tower of Babel. It was still accepted by leading religious authorities. But this notion was seriously brought into question by the publication of Darwin's theory of evolution. Those who rejected Darwinism ridiculed all attempts to conjure up language out of primitive calls, grunts, and ejaculations. No animals, it was pointed out, had yet achieved communication remotely resembling the use of words. On the other side were those who held that it was possible to account for the birth of language rationally as a function of the development of human communicational needs in society.
Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle
Title | Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle PDF eBook |
Author | Christine Ferguson |
Publisher | Routledge |
Total Pages | 166 |
Release | 2017-03-02 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1351923323 |
Christine Ferguson's timely study is the first comprehensive examination of the importance of language in forming a crucial nexus among popular fiction, biology, and philology at the Victorian fin-de-siècle. Focusing on a variety of literary and non-literary texts, the book maps out the dialogue between the Victorian life and social sciences most involved in the study of language and the literary genre frequently indicted for causing linguistic corruption and debasement - popular fiction. Ferguson demonstrates how Darwinian biological, philological, and anthropological accounts of 'primitive' and animal language were co-opted into wider cultural debates about the apparent brutality of popular fiction, and shows how popular novelists such as Marie Corelli, Grant Allen, H.G. Wells, H. Rider Haggard, and Bram Stoker used their fantastic narratives to radically reformulate the relationships among language, thought, and progress that underwrote much of the contemporary prejudice against mass literary taste. In its alignment of scientific, cultural, and popular discourses of human language, Language, Science, and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle stands as a corrective to assessments of best-selling fiction's intellectual, ideological, and aesthetic simplicity.
The Review of Reviews
Title | The Review of Reviews PDF eBook |
Author | William Thomas Stead |
Publisher | |
Total Pages | 680 |
Release | 1891 |
Genre | Europe |
ISBN |