Philosophical-amoeba - Lost In Space...

fangtooth moray photos by Sacha Lobenstein

Frogs and toads in Scotland

Quick Study of the Maiko’s Furisode Kimono+Undergarments! 

Just a simple little vocabulary dump! Still learning the details (there are many!) and would love any corrections or elaborations to be made!

Hadajuban: The first layer underneath a Maiko’s kimono. It is said that Geiko and Maiko don’t wear underwear because it throws off the line of the kimono; instead, they wear multi-layer undergarments.

Nagajuban: Another garment with sleeves, made of cotton, that goes over the Hadajuban.

Koshihimo: An under-wrap belt that holds the undergarments together in a foundation shape for the kimono over it.

Korin belt: Ties the juban collars together.

Obi-Ita: Stiff padding that will help to hold the obi belt in place.

Obi-Makura: “Pillow” that ties around from the front. This supports the front of the obi belt. I’ve read it’s something only girls wearing kimono use.

Eri Shin: Long strand of cardboard or plastic that serves as a collar stiffener.

Tabi: White, sometimes buttoned up, socks that separate the big toe from the rest of the four toes. Worn along with a Maiko’s Okobo or Zori.

Furisode Kimono: Formal-looking kimono with a characteristic of long, billowy sleeves with the seam connecting the top sleeve to the hanging sleeve visible. This kimono is also a popular formal traditional kimono for unmarried women. Originally, furisode kimono were only worn by children (both boys and girls) from well-off or even wealthy families. This connects the tradition of the Maiko symbolizing “childhood” and “youthfulness”. 

Maru Obi: Primarily used by Maiko (or traditional brides), these especially formal obi belts are heavy, rich with brocade embroidery and very long. Both sides are usually fully patterned; a Maiko wears her obi tied in the back, one end of the belt folded slightly over the other, cascading in a loose-look down to her ankles.  

Obi-jime: A thin braid of stippled silk that wraps around the front of the obi and holds it together with a final touch. The obi clasps are expensive and beautiful bejeweled and are attached to the obi-jime to adorn the front of the kimono.

Please message me if you’d like to add an ingredient to this list! I work with google and the books I have for accurate and complete information, and sometimes I just can’t find all that I’m lookin’ for! Thanks!

( @gion-lady )

Hearing with your eyes – A Western style of speech perception

Which parts of a person’s face do you look at when you listen them speak? Lip movements affect the perception of voice information from the ears when listening to someone speak, but native Japanese speakers are mostly unaffected by that part of the face. Recent research from Japan has revealed a clear difference in the brain network activation between two groups of people, native English speakers and native Japanese speakers, during face-to-face vocal communication.

It is known that visual speech information, such as lip movement, affects the perception of voice information from the ears when speaking to someone face-to-face. For example, lip movement can help a person to hear better under noisy conditions. On the contrary, dubbed movie content, where the lip movement conflicts with a speaker’s voice, gives a listener the illusion of hearing another sound. This illusion is called the “McGurk effect.”

According to an analysis of previous behavioral studies, native Japanese speakers are not influenced by visual lip movements as much as native English speakers. To examine this phenomenon further, researchers from Kumamoto University measured and analyzed gaze patterns, brain waves, and reaction times for speech identification between two groups of 20 native Japanese speakers and 20 native English speakers.

The difference was clear. When natural speech is paired with lip movement, native English speakers focus their gaze on a speaker’s lips before the emergence of any sound. The gaze of native Japanese speakers, however, is not as fixed. Furthermore, native English speakers were able to understand speech faster by combining the audio and visual cues, whereas native Japanese speakers showed delayed speech understanding when lip motion was in view.

“Native English speakers attempt to narrow down candidates for incoming sounds by using information from the lips which start moving a few hundreds of milliseconds before vocalizations begin. Native Japanese speakers, on the other hand, place their emphasis only on hearing, and visual information seems to require extra processing,” explained Kumamoto University’s Professor Kaoru Sekiyama, who lead the research.

Kumamoto University researchers then teamed up with researchers from Sapporo Medical University and Japan’s Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) to measure and analyze brain activation patterns using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Their goal was to elucidate differences in brain activity between the two languages.

The functional connectivity in the brain between the area that deals with hearing and the area that deals with visual motion information, the primary auditory and middle temporal areas respectively, was stronger in native English speakers than in native Japanese speakers. This result strongly suggests that auditory and visual information are associated with each other at an early stage of information processing in an English speaker’s brain, whereas the association is made at a later stage in a Japanese speaker’s brain. The functional connectivity between auditory and visual information, and the manner in which the two types of information are processed together was shown to be clearly different between the two different language speakers.

“It has been said that video materials produce better results when studying a foreign language. However, it has also been reported that video materials do not have a very positive effect for native Japanese speakers,” said Professor Sekiyama. “It may be that there are unique ways in which Japanese people process audio information, which are related to what we have shown in our recent research, that are behind this phenomenon.”

These findings were published in the journal “Scientific Reports” on August 11th and October 13th, 2016.

71 vintage photos captured daily life of Yokohama in the late 1900s.

A brief history of Polari: the curious after-life of the dead language for gay men

While few people use the language today, many cherish its history.

Well this was something I didn’t know about! So the gist is that Polari was a secret language  for gay men (much like thieves cant) in the UK used before the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1967. 

What Polari shows and is an example of, is that everyday people USE language for particular purposes that shape our identity. Interestingly, much like other words or varieties of languages that are considered negative, sexist or racist by society, using Polari was seen by some homosexuals as a form of oppression and acknowledgment of being somehow fundamentally different from non-homosexuals.   

The Black Book of Carmarthen is the oldest surviving manuscript written entirely in the Welsh language. It was penned by a single scribe working at different periods around the year 1250.

Read on

Scroll of Esther, Venice, 18th century

This Venetian eighteenth century Scroll of Esther is enclosed within an elegant tubular scrolled filigree case. The cylindrical case of delicate silver filigree is beautifully decorated with floral motifs, with a gilded, flower-shaped element on top. In contrast to its richly ornamented case, the parchment scroll is very simple and has no decorations around the handwritten text. 

U. Nahon Museum of Jewish Italian Art Gift of Mrs. Zaban in memory of her parents, who were murdered in Auschwitz. Trieste, 1987 

Oval Eggs

The word egg was a borrowing from Old Norse egg, replacing the native word ey (plural eyren) from Old English ǣġ, plural ǣġru.  Like “children” and “kine” (obsolete plural of cow), the plural ending -en was added redundantly to the plural form in Middle English.  As with most borrowings from Old Norse, this showed up first in northern dialects of English, and gradually moved southwards, so that for a while, ey and egg were used in different parts of England.

In 1490, when William Caxton printed the first English-language books, he wrote a prologue to his publication of Eneydos (Aeneid in contemporary English) in which he discussed the problems of choosing a dialect to publish in, due to the wide variety of English dialects that existed at the time.  This word was a specific example he gave.  He told a story about some merchants from London travelling down the Thames and stopping in a village in Kent 

And one of theym… cam in to an hows and axed for mete and specyally he axyd after eggys, and the goode wyf answerde that she could speke no Frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry, for he also coude speke no Frenshe, but wolde have hadde egges; and she understode hym not. And thenne at laste a-nother sayd that he wolde have eyren. Then the good wyf sayd that she understod hym wel. Loo, what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges, or eyren? Certaynly it is hard to playse every man, by-cause of dyversite and chaunge of langage.

The merchant in this story was only familiar with the word egg, while the woman only knew ey, and the confusion was only resolved by someone who knew both words.  Indeed, the woman in the story was so confused by this unfamiliar word egg that she assumed it must be a French word!  The word “meat” (or “mete” as Caxton spelled it) was a generic word for “food” at the time.

The word ey may also survive in the term Cockney, thought to derive from the Middle English cocken ey (”cock’s egg”), a term given to a small misshapen egg, and applied by rural people to townspeople

Both egg and ey derived from the same Proto-Germanic root, *ajją, which apparently had a variant *ajjaz in West Germanic.  This Proto-Germanic form in turn derived from Proto-Indo-European *h2ōwyóm.  In Latin, this root became ōvum, from which the adjective ōvalis meaning “egg-shaped”, was derived.  Ōvum itself was borrowed into English in the biological sense of the larger gamete in animals, while ōvalis is the source of oval.

The PIE root is generally though to derive from the root *h2éwis, “bird”, which is the source of Latin avis “bird”, source of English terms such as aviation.  This word may also be related to *h2ówis “sheep”, which survived in English as ewe.  One theory is that they were both derived from a root meaning something like “to dress”, “to clothe”, with bird meaning “one who is clothed [in feathers]” and sheep meaning “one who clothes [by producing wool]”.

E H Shepard illustration from Now we are six by A A Milne