Intellectual stimulation

One positive aspect of Skypeland is the ability to connect with others who have similar interests and share information. For example, there is a group of scientists, largely centered in Brazil, that meets in the evenings to talk about research results in medicine, neuroscience, biology and related fields. A friend from California often hosts casts that deal with language and brain function. We swap references, links to podcasts and videos and ideas. I sometimes muse about the nature of consciousness and like to hear the ideas of others on this topic.

One of my favorite areas to investigate is the origin of various foods. I also like etymology. I was talking with a friend about profiteroles (the French name for cream puffs) and found out that they were made from "choux" dough. I realized that the French words "choux" and "chou" (meaning cabbage) were homonyms.

The word "chou" is often heard in the expression of endearment common in French, "Mon petit chou", which always struck me as a little strange. Cabbages have many deep connections to history:

The brutal Roman Emperor and persecutor of Christians Diocletian refused to
return to power after he retired to grow cabbages, saying "Have you seen my
cabbages?"

and culture:

For example, cabbages appear in the poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter" by Lewis
Carroll, pseudonym of mathematician Charles Dodgson.

These are the kinds of bits of trivia that I find fascinating. Even something as prosaic as a cabbage can be interesting.

There are words that are not homonyms in their native language, but sound like homonyms to native speakers of other languages. There might be a fancy term for this, like "pseudohomonym" or something, but I don't know of one. The French words "cou" (neck), "coup" (strike), "queue" (line) and "cul" (posterior) sound very different to a native Francophone, but to English ears sound almost identical. There are similar families of words in Chinese that sound the same to Anglophones. The "r" and "l" sounds that sound so different to Anglophones are difficult for Japanese and Chinese speakers to distinguish, which is a common source of comedy and confusion. (According to a linguist I asked, Chinese has no "r" sound, and Japanese has no "l" sound, but both have a trilled-r sound. The Japanese apparently substitute an "r" sound for an "l". The Chinese substitute an "l" sound for an "r", called lallation, a type of lambdacism, which are classified as an inability to prounce the "r" sound, called rhotacism.)

This appears to be associated to the existence of these sounds in a given language, and the programming of the brains of the people to be able to hear these different sounds. This might be part of the reason that all dog barking sounds like nonsense to us, when dogs have been shown to be able to make hundreds of different barks that carry information from one dog to another, as has been discovered by recent research. I wonder about human difficulties in decoding cetacean sounds and songs in spite of decades of effort.

There is clear evidence of animal ability to pass on information from generation to generation. For example, animals are afraid of humans on those islands in the Galapagos where humans slaughtered the animals 100+ years ago. On neighboring islands that have no such history, the animals show no fear at all of humans.

There is tremendous conceit among humans when it comes to our language abilities.

Addendum: Somewhat related to the concept of spoonerism, it is common in English to alter the order of phonemes in a word. Sometimes, as in the case of "ask" and "axe", this has roots in Old English, when ascian and axian/acsian were both in use. Similarly, aspen and apse both were common names for a type of tree. However, this can also be just an error, and in that case it is called metathesis: (pretty/purdy, nuclear/nucular, introduce/interduce, etc).