Teaching Koko to ‘speak’: “Me Fine Animal Gorilla; you Penny”

Can we really communicate with apes?

Some of you may vaguely recall Koko, the gorilla who became famous in the 1980s and 90s for her ability to ‘speak’ using American Sign Language.  To date she can use over 1,000 signs and understands 2,000 words of spoken English.  Admittedly I elaborated the quote for the title, but Koko did once sign ‘fine animal gorilla’ when describing herself.  Another time when asked, ‘Who are you?’ she replied more cryptically, ‘polite me thirsty feel Koko-love’.

Recently I came across the 1978 documentary ‘Koko: A Talking Gorilla’ and was fascinated at the extent of Koko’s ability.  I wondered why these types of studies are less publicised today or if they are even still conducted.

Dr Penny Patterson, the founder of the Gorilla Institute and Koko’s personal teacher, has been a mother figure to the animal since adopting her as an infant from San Francisco Zoo forty years ago.  In 1981 Patterson published her experiences in the book ‘The Education of Koko’…

At the time there was a surge in media coverage.  As well as several appearances on television, Koko featured in articles written by the New York Times and National Geographic Magazine.  She even met high profile film stars such as Robin Williams and Leonardo Di Caprio.

Had we finally broken through the communication barrier between humans and animals?  And if communication was possible, could we find out whether apes understand abstract concepts such as freedom, love, good, guilt and self?  After all, empathy, ego and a sense of morals are some of the recognised human attributes which ‘separate us’ from animals.

Earlier Studies in Primate Communication:

Throughout the last century different groups of scientists, psychologists and linguists have conducted research into how communication through language develops, and whether it can be taught to non-human primates.  In 1925 the psychologist Robert Yerkes suggested that the vocalisations of chimpanzees are not true language, but ‘primarily innate emotional expressions’.  During the 1940s Keith and Kathy Hayes taught Vicki the chimpanzee to say ‘mama’, ‘papa’ and ‘cup’, although the whispering sounds she managed to produce were barely recognisable.  After similar attempts to get chimps to vocally mimic language failed, other researchers realised that great apes don’t have the right vocal chords or mouth shape to recreate human speech.

Yerkes observed that in the wild, chimpanzees already use diverse gestures to communicate and that there was evidence that the animals could occasionally ‘act with insight’.  He proposed that primates could perhaps be taught to use simple gestures to ‘converse’ non-verbally.  During the 60s and 70s Allen and Beatrix Gardener taught the female chimpanzee Washoe around 350 words of American Sign Language (ASL).  This was the first successful case, seeming to prove that apes had the ability to comprehend and communicate basic words.  The chimp also created the name ‘water bird’ when she encountered a duck.

 

Conversations with Koko

Some of Koko’s invented gestures.

Like Washoe, Koko occasionally uses her vocabulary of signs to invent compound names for objects, for example calling a ring a ‘finger bracelet’.  Likewise a hair brush becomes ‘scratch comb’; and a mask is an ‘eye hat’.  This can be interpreted as evidence of ‘concept combination’ in language.  When shown pictures of objects Koko will do the corresponding sign and vice versa proving that she can create simple associations between ‘objects’ and their corresponding ‘signs’.  Examples of rudimentary sentence construction include: “Thirsty, like milk,” and “Lips fake candy give me”.

Yet when teacher and pupil interact, Koko often signs so many alternative answers to a single question that it seems like Dr Penny Patterson (perhaps subconsciously) just waits for the word that makes the most sense, and thus reinforces her own subjective interpretation in the process.  At one point in the 1978 documentary Koko is sitting in front of a dictionary.  Penny is trying to teach her the concept of the word ‘wet’.  She asks: ‘wet is like…?’

To which Koko responds with a string of words: candy gum, forget, nut eat, polite, thirsty swallow that, Koko love, eat hungry.

Penny responds with an upbeat: ‘Koko’s tongue is brilliant pink’

Koko then sticks out her tongue and tries to look at it.  She continues signing: pink, pink, pink, sleep.

‘You can’t even see it from there,’ Penny says, referring to Koko’s tongue.  Penny gives Koko a mirror.  The gorilla takes it and sticks out her tongue.

‘You’ve got sparkles on your nose, I noticed that’

Koko rubs at her nose. Red, frown, mouth: she signs, pulling faces at herself in the mirror.

Whether or not Koko understands the word ‘wet’, she still has an impressive sense of self-awareness and a good enough comprehension of language to poke out her tongue in front of the mirror soon after Penny remarks on its colour.

During the documentary, Patterson suggests the gorilla can refer to past events and recognises previous misconduct:

“One day, the day before, [Koko] had bitten a companion. I asked her, ‘what did you do yesterday?’  She signed wrong wrong.  I said, ‘what’s wrong?’  She signed bite, so she remembered.”

Koko certainly has a mischievous side.  Dr Patterson describes an instance where Koko – being scolded after eating a pot plant – lied to her saying that Bill (the grad student) had eaten it!  When Patterson responded, ‘Bill didn’t eat the plant.  He’s not a gorilla, did you eat the plant?’ Koko swiftly replied some other gorilla.

Controversy & Tough Times

As exciting and moving as these accounts and videos are, during the forty years she has been running the project Dr Patterson unfortunately hasn’t presented much data to the scientific community which can be properly reviewed.  Despite contributing to 50 academic papers, critics maintain her results are hard to support, mainly because Dr Patterson rarely allows Koko to be tested by independent investigators.  If you are interested, I recommend reading Patterson’s paper ‘The Case for the Personhood of Gorillas’.

Dr Patterson published several books including ‘Koko Love’, ‘Koko’s Kitten’ and ‘Koko’s Story’ for young children.  By favouring mass media and the popular press Patterson may have set herself and her research on a rockier road; by way of opposition.  Many linguists are skeptical of Koko’s 1000-sign vocabulary; believing that the gorilla merely imitates gestures after picking up on certain clues.

Another difficulty has been the struggle to find Koko a mate to produce the prized offspring that the Gorilla Foundation still hope could complete their family of signing gorillas.  Unfortunately Koko’s first male companion Michael died quite young and since then all efforts to get a mate for Koko have failed.  Now the foundation’s efforts remain focused on raising enough money to relocate the foundation to a better site in Maui.

Results of Other Studies

photo credit: Susan Kuklin, Science Photo Library

To answer one of my earlier questions, the scientist, Herbert Terrace can be held partly responsible for the decline in this type of animal research.  In the 1970s academics were enthusiastically debating whether apes could learn language, with the opposing camps equally determined to disprove the other.  On the one side were the Chomskians; who agreed with the famous linguist Noam Chomsky that only humans have the ability to ‘talk’.  On the other were the Skinnerians like the Gardeners, who believed Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner’s theory that as language is a learned skill, it could be taught to non-human primates.

In the 1980s the Gardeners produced a pivotal film entitled ‘The First Signs of Washoe’ which aimed to disprove the Chomskian view with footage of the chimp speaking in sign language.  Terrace decided to investigate further, initially believing he could also disprove Chomsky.

Consequently Terrace ran his own tightly controlled experiments with a group of colleagues.  They raised a chimp called Nim Chimsky (a cheeky pun) and taught him sign language using similar techniques to the Gardeners.  On the one hand, Nim mastered the use of sign language to label objects and actions, just as Washoe had done.  However, like Washoe and Koko, Nim struggled to construct sentences with the proper word order.  He would sign sequences like ‘Nim eat grape grape grape eat eat Nim eat’.

An extra consideration that should be made is that ASL is structured around ‘concepts’ and doesn’t follow the same sentence structure as standard spoken English.  Therefore it may sound a lot more grammatically incorrect to a non-signing person than to a person fluent in ASL.  For instance ‘I have two sisters’ is broken down into the ASL signs ‘two sisters, me.’ It isn’t clear whether Terrace took this into account when he published their findings three years later.

Slow-motion analysis of the footage of Nim, Washoe and other apes ‘talk-signing’ showed that the chimps mostly imitated their human trainers and made more errors than correct signs.  As I cautiously pointed out earlier in the case of Dr Patterson and Koko, the Nim and Washoe’s trainers often chose to ignore the errors and responded only to the chimps correct word sequences.  Meanwhile they were unconsciously prompting the apes to respond in a certain way.

The scientists concluded that although chimps can be taught to label objects correctly, they cannot learn to construct basic sentences, even at the level of a two year old human toddler.  Terrace points out that proof of correct labelling ability isn’t enough evidence to support the hypothesis that chimps can actually learn language.  Longer word strings rarely contained more useful information and ‘speech’ wasn’t spontaneously volunteered by the apes.  In most cases, Nim would only communicate by answering direct questions to get his reward of food.

Conversely,  other researchers were determined to continue the studies.  Sue Savage-Rumbaugh conducted a detailed study of language acquisition in bonobos and found that a particular ‘student’, Kanji could consistantly generate two-word sentences with correct word order.  For instance the bonobo demonstrated that he understood the difference between the phrases, ‘tickle Kanji’ and ‘Kanji tickle’.  Thus Savage-Rumbaugh proved that a chimp could use a primitive form of grammar which the researchers coined ‘protogrammar’.

Conclusion

There’s no doubt that Koko is a very intelligent gorilla. The fact she can correctly express her emotions in sign language – using words like ‘happy’, ‘sad’, ‘afraid’, ‘enjoy’, ‘mad’ and ‘love’ – is amazing in itself.  Not only does she love to play ‘tickle’ with her handlers, Koko also cracks ‘jokes’ and expressed distress when her beloved pet kitten died.  Whereas I truly want to believe that Koko feels and understands all these things and her reactions don’t equate to ‘monkey see monkey do’, there is the niggling matter of anthropomorphism. In the documentary Koko: A Talking Gorilla, the director of San Francisco Zoo, Saul Kitchener, voices a concern shared by opposers to Patterson’s ‘Gorilla Language Project’…  What if Koko is being “made human” against her own animal will?  Would she in fact be better off in a more natural environment within the company of her own species?  At certain times during the documentory I also felt uneasy at the level of ‘unnatural’ interaction betwen Koko and the human world which encompasses most aspects of her daily routine.  The expectation placed upon the gorilla seems high.  Who is really benefitting from this relationship?

Despite Herbert Terraces assertions that apes mostly mimic the signs of their human trainers and may not fully understand what they are signing, Koko appears to have surprisingly lucid and insightful moments (for a gorilla).  For example after an experiencing an earthquake Koko was asked ‘What happened?’  She replied ‘Darn darn floor bad bite.  Trouble Trouble.’

Perhaps, like Dr Penny Patterson may well be, I am wistfully cherry-picking from the best phrases Koko has ever uttered in my eagerness for the ‘talking’ ape concept to be true.  Or maybe we should simply be satisfied that a channel of communication, however narrow, has been opened between animals and humans.  Although apes may not be able to grasp language and syntax in the truest sense, these studies have brought some important side issues to light.

Although the extent of an ape’s self-awareness, emotional intelligence and perception of abstract concepts still remains unclear, through reading different articles and watching Koko in action I have been reminded how much animals should be respected in their own right.  Just because we can’t verbally communicate with an ape, a sheep or even a lobster doesn’t give us the right to treat the animal kingdom as we please, on the ignorant assumption that they don’t experience true emotions.  If I go on much further I might talk myself into becoming a vegan, so instead I’ll end here with the Gorilla Foundation’s mission statement:  To bring interspecies communication to the public, to save gorillas from extinction and to inspire children to create a sustainable future.

Sources:

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/alumni/Magazine/Fall2009/feature4.html

http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-m/patterson01.htm

http://www.psywww.com/intropsych/ch08_animals/ape_language.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=8uCkC5MImNc&feature=endscreen

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/07/01/obituaries/beatrix-t-gardner-dies-at-61-taught-signs-to-a-chimpanzee.html

http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/koko-the-talking-gorilla/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_acquisition

http://www.koko.org/world/

Cities & Eyes: How do you see the City?

“It is the mood of the beholder which gives the city of Zemrude its form.  If you go by whistling, your nose-a-tilt behind the whistle, you will know it from below: window sills, flapping curtains, fountains.  If you walk along hanging your head, your nails dug into the palms of your hands, your gaze will be held on the ground, in the gutters, the manhole covers, the fish scales, wastepaper.  You cannot say that one aspect of the city is truer than the other, but you hear of the upper Zemrude chiefly from those who remember it, as they sink into the lower Zemrude, following every day the same stretches of street and finding again each morning the ill-humour of the day before, encrusted at the foot of the walls.  For everyone, sooner or later, the day comes when we bring our gaze down along the drainpipes and we can no longer detach it from the cobblestones.  The reverse is not impossible, but it is more rare: and so we continue walking through Zemrude’s streets with eyes now digging into the cellars, the foundations, the wells.”

~ Extract from ‘Invisible Cities’ (Chapter: Cities & Eyes 2) by Italo Calvino.

When I first started reading ‘Invisible Cities’, I wasn’t sure what to make of it.  Each page describes a different imaginary city; some fantastical, others striking allegories of the way we relate to cities today.  The more I read, the more fascinated I became.  Calvino writes with such flair, weaving the bizarre and the beautiful into one outstanding whole.  It is the best plotless book I have ever read.  Reading ‘Invisible Cities’ is comparable to walking through a dream.  When I read the passage above, I suddenly realised …

So often I walk along a street with my eyes cast down, my head filled with how I’m going to achieve the next objective for the day.  People become obstacles to circumnavigate; my feet find familiar footholds on the pavement, away from the unsteady grates and uneven corners.

How many of us stop our daily routine to look up?  I barely do except when I’m in tourist mode with camera in hand.  Even then the camera acts as a filter, obscuring our connection to the upper levels of the city.  Aside from the monuments and landmark buildings much of the character of a city rests on what is above our eye level.  With the decline in independent stores, shop fronts (with their trademark logos and uniform displays) make the eye-level city a cloned experience, no different from the next city.  But beyond this soulless environment rises a textured, multi-layered story.  So on Monday I am going to tear my eyes from the familiar.  Join me.  Look up and really see the city.

Brontosaurus: the Deceptive Thunder Lizard

Do you remember the Brontosaurus?  Surely you have heard of the trusty champion of the gigantic sauropod dinosaurs?  The massive yet gentle plant-eating creature of the Jurassic Period found its way into popular culture in the 20^th century, appearing on US Post Office stamps in 1989 and in an episode of Monty Python in 1974 starring Graham Chapman and John Cleese as Miss Anne Elk.

Perhaps the dinosaur’s most famous appearance was as a godzilla-esque villain in the 1925 silent movie adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World.  One part of the story features an ‘intense battle’ between a brontosaurus and an allosaurus.  I use inverted commas here because by our modern standards the fight between animated dinosaur figurines is delightfully comic and far from intense.   In the finale, the brontosaurus is seen running rampage in the streets of London.

If you haven’t encountered some of the scenes from this movie before, it really is a must see!

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Star of the Silver Screen: the special effects in Lost World

This particular adaptation of Lost World was the first feature length film to use stop motion animation.  Wills O’Brian – who later worked on the special effects for the original King Kong – used the split screen technique to combine the modelled dinosaurs with live action footage of the actors.  In 1922 Conan Doyle played the test reel during a meeting of the Society of American Magicians (of which Houdini was a member) whilst refusing to disclose the origin of the footage.  The audience was astonished.  None of them could figure out how the film makers achieved the special effects.  Allegedly one person even suggested that live dinosaurs must have been discovered and used for the filming.  On the following day the New York Times published a front page article saying that Conan Doyle’s “monsters of the ancient world…were extraordinarily lifelike.  If fakes they were masterpieces.”

To our CGI attuned eyes these ‘masterpieces’ of animation would certainly raise a smile now but however much we may chuckle at the old-fashioned depiction of dinosaurs, credit must be given to O’Brien’s pioneering work in the field of special effects.  In 1988 the Library of Congress labelled Lost World as “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” and the film was consequently selected for preservation at the US National Film Registry.

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O. Marsh!  Origins of the Confusion

Now back to the Brontosaurus.  Well, unfortunately, it turns out that this particular dinosaur technically never existed.  The story begins with a Paleontology professor at Yale, Othaniel Charles Marsh, and his discovery of the excavated bones of a large sauropod dinosaur in 1877 which he named the Apatosaurus ajax (Apatosaurus meaning ‘deceptive lizard’ in Greek and Ajax after the hero from Greek mythology).  The skeleton was incomplete and only a juvenile version; although Othaniel Marsh couldn’t realise this at the time.

Two years later when Marsh uncovered the more complete skeleton of a larger dinosaur – this time with only the skull and feet missing – he assumed it was from a new genus altogether.  In fact the find was simply the skeleton of a fully matured Apatosaurus. To complete the specimen Marsh used a skull from a different sauropod, the Brachiosaurus. He named the composite creation the Brontosaurus excelsus (thunder lizard).  Marsh’s ‘brontosaurus’ became the first mounted display of a sauropod to be erected in a public museum.  This dramatic debut ensured Bronto’s name became established in the public mind.

[image source: Wikidino.com]

Apatosaurus: Past and Current Interpretations

Of the sauropods, Apatosaurus was amongst the biggest, making the dinosaur one of the largest land animals ever to have walked upon the earth. Being around 25 m long and 4.5 m tall at the hip with a weight of over 35 metric tonnes, the initial conclusion drawn by scientists was that the Apatosaurus wouldn’t have been be able to support its own weight on dry land.  Moreover they incorrectly reasoned it must have lived half submerged in water, for instance in a swamp.  Another early misconception was that the dinosaurs walked with their necks raised up like a giraffe, in order to graze on high foliage. In fact later studies show that the heart would probably have had difficulty maintaining sufficient blood pressure to oxygenate the brain at such a height.

As early as 1903, paleontologist Elmer Riggs published a paper which stated that the Apatosaurus should be  renamed Apatosaurus excelsus to take into account the greater size of the adult specimen.  Other scientists agreed that that the two dinosaur skeletons were in fact of the same genus and should both be classed as Apatosaurus. Since then the word ‘brontosaurus’ has been gradually removed from scientific textbooks.  Nevertheless the original misnomer is often still accepted by today’s public as a synomym encompassing several species of sauropod.  So it seems the brontosaurus continues to thunder on in our imagination, whilst the question of which ‘lizard’ was truely decieving whom is to this day unclear.

Sources:

http://www.reference.com/browse/discrepancies

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_World_(1925_film)

http://sciencefocus.com/feature/environment/no-such-thing-brontosaurus

Thought Train (bird brain?)

Since yesterday’s post my mind has gone through an odd series of thoughts.  After a few meanderings I figured out how to link the topic of my previous post with the next work in progress.

The process began with the lingering thought about alternative ways I could illustrate the scene ‘In Mr Niwa’s garden, two chickens suddenly ate a crocodile.’  (Please read the previous post, it makes sense, I promise!)  Obviously domesticated chickens wouldn’t commit such a violent act, even if they were capable of killing a crocodile; but this reminded me of one of my favourite book illustrators when I was younger – Chris Riddell.

He produced some incredibly imaginative pen and ink drawings for the children’s fantasy series, the Edge Chronicles (co-written with Paul Stewart).  You might remember the books I’m referring to if you are in your late teens or early twenties, as they were quite popular at the time.  Anyway, there are these creatures called Shrykes, particularly bloodthirsty warrior birds led by the crazed Mother Muleclaw the Third.

[illustration from the Edge Chronicles book ‘Freeglader’]

In fact it seems that the authors’ choice of the word ‘shryke’ to name the beastly birds may well have originated from the real-life shrike, which is the name for a group of passerine birds (loosely meaning perching birds, or songbirds).  The largest genus of Shrike, the Lanius– from the Latin word ‘butcher’ – are therefore nicknamed the ‘butcher birds’ because of their grim feeding habits.

These birds often catch small insects and impale their bodies on thorns or barbed wire before eating them.  This has two benefits to the shrike, firstly that the flesh is torn into smaller bite-sized fragments, and secondly the thorn serves as a skewering point (sorry) to store food which the bird can return to later, much like squirrels horde nuts.  This behaviour also enables the birds to eat toxic grasshoppers.  After 1-2 days the toxins within the insect degrade to a safe level for the shrike to return and eat it.  For some great photos of a Loggerhead shrike and a poor grasshopper meeting its end, visit this blog by wildlife photographer Scott Simmons: http://www.learnoutdoorphotography.com/2011/11/loggerhead-shrike-meets-grasshopper.html

[photo by Glenn Vermeersch]

Both the imaginary shryke and its real world counterpart stirred up another thought of an even more nightmarish carnivorous bird.  Suddenly, the prehistoric ‘terror birds’ burst back into my mind.  It seems that my decade-old memories of watching the BBC series, ‘Walking with Beasts’, are still pretty vivid.  Phorusrhacids, also known colloquially as ‘terror birds’, were one of the largest predators that roamed Africa and South America in the Miocene Period around 15 million years ago.  These birds ranged between one and three meters in height and had a viciously hooked beak, making them top of the food chain. In 2006 the largest bird skull ever found was that of a terror bird, which was 71cm long in total with a 46 cm long beak.

Despite being flightless, scientists believe the birds were very fast and agile runners that could reach 30 mph.  By way of comparison, ostriches can run at 43 mph – but at least there is no threat of being devoured by one!

[Image from the ITV drama Primeval: Series 3]

My venture into the topic of prehistoric beasts set my mind on a course which led to dinosaurs.  Or more specifically at first, ‘Dinotopia’, the illustrated books by James Gurney.  A few days ago I’d flicked through one of his books when I re-discovered it at the bottom of my shelf.  Gurney’s fantastical full colour paintings depict adventures in a world where dinosaurs and humans co-exist.  I enjoy absorbing every detail in his images, from the architecture (which is a great mix of Venetian, Gothic, Classical, Romanesque and Mesopotamian) to the mechanical contraptions and medieval costumes.

[image from ‘Dinotopia: the World Beneath’ by James Gurney]

Whilst looking through a few of his images I realised that I’d subconsciously followed a course of discovery (and in some cases re-discovery) from my previous post to the upcoming one and that it might be worth recording the process…hence this post.  As an aside, I feel the insult ‘bird brain’ seems unfair as a reflection of bird intelligence; however that is a separate issue for another time.  Perhaps I should have rephrased my title to ‘birds on the brain’.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrike

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phorusrhacidae

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/dinosaurs/7953283/Prehistoric-terror-bird-pecked-creatures-to-death.html

Stół z powyłamywanymi nogami

[Image Source: djlfurnituremaker.com]

Recently, I overheard a conversation between a young Polish lady and her English friend.  She was trying to teach him how to say ‘a table with broken legs’ and it sounded like a real tongue twister. Stol z powylamywanymi nogami… Later, I managed to find some audio clips of the phrase online.

http://www.forvo.com/word/st%C3%B3%C5%82_z_powy%C5%82amywanymi_nogami/

Despite repeatedly pressing the play button my brain still couldn’t register the syllables in the correct order and I kept tripping up on the words.  I tried slow motion, word by word, but no; my tongue wasn’t having any of it!  After failing this particular challenge, I decided to search for some more crazy sounding phrases in other languages in an attempt to conquer at least one.

Along the way I encountered a few surprises, including this 24 character Estonian word, kuulilennuteetunneliluuk, meaning ‘the hatch a bullet flies out of when exiting a tunnel’!  Notice anything else unusual about the word?  It can be read from both ends, making it one of the longest palindromes I’ve ever seen.

In Hungarian the phrase: ‘Did you do this feigned deed?  You doer of feigned deeds!’ sounds more like a stuttering firework…Te tetted e tettetett tettet? Tettetett tettek tettese, te!

Apparently the longest word ever used is written in Sanskrit literature.  In Sanskrit it is possible to make a word as long as you want or feel is necessary, at least in written form.  This is because nouns, verbs and their meanings can be expressed in one long compound word, where each individual word is separated by a hyphen.  So the insanely long word (from the Varadāmbikā Pariṇaya Campū of Tirumalāmbā) looks like this:

निरन्तरान्धकारिता-दिगन्तर-कन्दलदमन्द-सुधारस-बिन्दु-सान्द्रतर-घनाघन-वृन्द-सन्देहकर-स्यन्दमान-मकरन्द-बिन्दु-बन्धुरतर-माकन्द-तरु-कुल-तल्प-कल्प-मृदुल-सिकता-जाल-जटिल-मूल-तल-मरुवक-मिलदलघु-लघु-लय-कलित-रमणीय-पानीय-शालिका-बालिका-करार-विन्द-गलन्तिका-गलदेला-लवङ्ग-पाटल-घनसार-कस्तूरिकातिसौरभ-मेदुर-लघुतर-मधुर-शीतलतर-सलिलधारा-निराकरिष्णु-तदीय-विमल-विलोचन-मयूख-रेखापसारित-पिपासायास-पथिक-लोकान्

And the rough translation is somewhat beautiful in its description in spite of the lack of sentence structure:

“In it, the distress, caused by thirst, to travellers, was alleviated by clusters of rays of the bright eyes of the girls; the rays that were shaming the currents of light, sweet and cold water charged with the strong fragrance of cardamom, clove, saffron, camphor and musk and flowing out of the pitchers (held in) the lotus-like hands of maidens (seated in) the beautiful water-sheds, made of the thick roots of vetiver mixed with marjoram, (and built near) the foot, covered with heaps of couch-like soft sand, of the clusters of newly sprouting mango trees, which constantly darkened the intermediate space of the quarters, and which looked all the more charming on account of the trickling drops of the floral juice, which thus caused the delusion of a row of thick rainy clouds, densely filled with abundant nectar.”

In Japanese the narrative phrase ‘In Mr Niwa’s garden, two chickens suddenly ate a crocodile,’ becomes:

にわの庭には、二羽の鶏はにわかにわにを食べた

Niwa no niwa ni wa, niwa no niwatori wa niwaka ni wani o tabeta.

And finally I just about managed the last tongue-twister, although a Japanese person might not understand what on earth I was saying.  To celebrate my single victory I was inspired to illustrate the crocodile eating event…or rather, as you can see below, the moment just before horror strikes.

After the exhausting search for and attempt at speaking long words in foreign languages, I liken my tiredness to the Estonian sünnipäevanädalalõpupeopärastlõunaväsimus… which means “the tiredness one feels on the afternoon of the weekend birthday party”.  Therefore I must say: so long…farewell…auf wiedersehen…goodnight…

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_word

http://www.omniglot.com/language/tonguetwisters/index.htm

Things: A definition

 

 

So thus begins my first blog post ever, with the thought: what are ‘things’ exactly?  After all if I am going to write about them I’d better make sure that my journey into the discovery of said ‘things’ is properly informed.  Or in other words I need to figure out exactly what this blog is about!

‘Things’ seem to permeate the universe, much like its close cousin ‘stuff’.  During one stage of my teenage years, I remember being told off for being too vague.  I liked ‘lots of things’ and did ‘stuff’ at the weekend.

According to the trusty dictionary however, a ‘thing’ has eighteen definitions, including:

• a material object without life or consciousness
• that which is expedient or necessary
• aim; objective
• anything that is or may become an object of thought

My favourite one is the last… [Any-thing]: the word is inescapable, even its own explanation.  There are lots of subjects I’d love to know a little more about so this will be my opportunity to note down some of the more exciting snippets of information, odd facts, inspiring creations and tales I stumble across.  It feels necessary to begin this adventure into blogging the discovery of things – I am long fed up with struggling to recall a half remembered interesting fact from the murky depths of my memory.  My objective is to build up a bank of posts of ‘things’ that inspire, cause me to ponder or marvel.  I hope the resultant collection lives up to its name and you enjoy reading it as much as I anticipate enjoying writing it!

Finally I’d like to dedicate the existence of this blog to my extraordinary and wonderful (ex) flatmate who encouraged me to continue writing and pursue a summer full of reading books that have long been on the ‘to-read’ shelf.    All those late nights spent talking about things: from our plans for the future to the astounding thought that we are all ‘beings of stardust’…the same elements that make the universe.  So, Zoe: here’s to our summer and all that’s to come.  Cheers!