Morning miscellany

Some interesting things that distracted me this morning. First, from a publicity e-newsletter:

"Churches, competing for more members during a time when nearly half of American adults switch religion affiliations, are turning to corporate marketing strategies such as focus groups, customer-satisfaction surveys and product giveaways.

"And pastors hire "secret church shoppers" to report on what they find during their undercover visits. Did someone greet them when they arrived? Were the restrooms clean? Was parking adequate? And what about the sermons?"

That's an excuse for a picture of some stained glass by Chagall at Tudeley:

Secondly, language, and how categories underly reasoning - the Japanese classifier hon "is normally used to mark nouns in the category of “long skinny things”—pencils, candles, hair, rope, and so on. This classifier also applies to nouns that don’t objectively fit that model, but which have some indirect connection. A volleyball serve is hon, for example, because the trajectory of the ball is long and thin; a roll of tape uses this classifier because it’s long and thin when unrolled; telephone calls are hon because they are made using wires, which are long and thin; and TV shows are hon because of their similarity to telephone calls. There are many other examples, but what [Berkeley linguist George] Lakoff wanted to show was that even though a volleyball serve, a roll of tape, and a TV show share no objective quality, Japanese speakers automatically group these things together because of a mental category that depends on metaphor.

"Even in English, we implicitly group words in classes. For example, Lakoff points out [in his book "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things"] that we put time in the same category as money—it’s something that can be “spent,” “saved,” “earned,” or “wasted,” even though time is an abstract concept that doesn’t have any objective characteristics in common with money. Recognizing these unconscious connections can lead to rethinking one’s assumptions about the way the world works."

One of the fascinating things about learning Mandarin is this kind of insight into the underlying reasoning in a very different culture. (Another is the way that language, and its writing system, has evolved without any input from other languages.)

While looking for a "hon"ish picture, I came across a blog from Japan written in English but with a long post in German. Well German is my mother tongue and it's good to use it now and then (my vocabulary is mostly stuck at the childish stage) so here's a list of words from that blog post that might come in useful some day: kommunkationsunfreudig, Stoffrausch, Suchanfrage, Naehblockade, Handarbeitsinsel, Stofflager, wuehlen.

And the concept of "herbst"ing ("es herbstet" - it's becoming fall/autumn) is timely - today the wet streets and pavements are covered with golden leaves.