This year I have been enjoying a Gary Larson daily calendar. It goes without saying that Gary has a unique insight into reality in our lives. Many of his cartoons use issues that are illuminated by a linguistic view point.
For example, in this frame, the dog has written a threat letter to the cats, but the dog only uses one word.
Our dog certainly has a wider vocabulary than one kind of bark, but for each situation such as a barking at a stranger, he only uses one ‘word’. However, he does vary his barks. Some barks are louder and there is variation in pitch. His series of barks could be interpretted as having prosody (variation in pitch and emphasis). Of course, we as humans can’t tell if there is any information that can be interpretted from the variation, or if it just means that he is not capable of generating a series of barks that are identical.
Here is another frame relating to dogs. Dogs certainly understand many human words – their name, ‘out’, ‘walk’, ’sit’, ‘go lay down’, etc. But dogs don’t make a relationship between words when uttered in a series. My interpretation is that they hear one or two words in a context and use that as the entire meaning of the situation. Our dog is very tuned into ‘walk’.
This frame is about meeting aliens and trying to communicate through translation of language. The assumption is that if we do ever meet an alien, that the same technique for language translation we use between human languages will also work with aliens. This will certainly be the place to start, but what if the alien brain language structures are different than ours? In other words, Chomksy has helped us see that all human languages are based on similar structures, but if we do meet aliens, we won’t necessarily be able to rely on the existence of that similarity.
This frame shows how a misinterpretation of a foreign word can be used as a joke. Of course, Webster’s gives us the definition for Kemosabe as “faithful friend”.
This frame shows a common play on words. Take a phrase or frequent saying and replace one or more of the words. Also in this case, he is using a homophone (same sound different spelling) for ‘ate’ versus ‘8′.
This frame makes fun of our basic drives for attracting mates. The truth is that many of our instincts come from our more simple ancestors. The only real difference between us and lower animals is that we are self-aware and are able to modify our behavior in much more complex ways.
My appologies to the copyright holder of these images.
