text:
6 Startups Selling Retail Automation Solutions with AI
Earlier this year, autonomous retail store Amazon Go opened to much fanfare, which just goes to show you how much we love buying isht. Every organization on the planet—even the 24-hour Elon Musk show known as Futurism—covered the event as if it were a visit by the pope. Headlines declared that the store of the future is here—and then promptly chased after the next squirrel. We've been watching the evolution of retail automation for a while now, so as the store went live in Seattle, we wrote about 11 Examples of Grocery Store Technology that will enable the grocery stores of the future. While Amazon Go is probably the most advanced convenience store on the planet, it's far from being the only one ushering in the era of retail automation – where self-checkout is replaced by no checkout at all.
The New York Times reported that between 30 and 50 percent of the world's retail jobs could be at risk as technologies like automated checkout help human workers find value-added tasks in the unemployment line. To put that in perspective: About five million people are employed as retail sales workers in the United States alone, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Times also noted that venture capitalists have put $100 million into retail automation startups in the United States each of the past two years, based on research from financial data firm Pitchbook. Below we check out six startups trying to sell the world on retail automation, and using artificial intelligence to make it happen.
Check Out China
Our regular readers know that we've been preaching about the rise of China in disruptive technologies. The communist country with a capitalist soul is particularly interested in becoming the leader in artificial intelligence, including competing in the increasingly crowded AI chip race against top dog Nvidia. So it's not surprising that a few companies are already opening unmanned locations where China's 1.3 billion people can buy stuff Made in China.
Founded in 2016 and backed by $94.7 million in venture capital, including an $80 million Series B in January, BingoBox appears to be the best-funded startup of the bunch. The company has reportedly opened about 300 stores in 30 cities. However, they're not as high-tech as Amazon Go. Yet. Instead of using artificial intelligence and computer vision to ID products to tally each customer's bill, consumers at a BingoBox scan a QR code to enter the store where sales items have RFID tags. However, the company is in the midst of transitioning to an AI system called Fan AI that uses facial recognition (a Chinese specialty) to recognize customers (and prevent theft). The automated checkout counters can then tally up a purchase using object recognition.
A BingoBox store in China. Customers must scan a QR code at the kiosk in order to enter the shop.
The Big Brother treatment even extends to the store shelves. Cameras capture what customers are most interested in and then send promotional messages to their smartphones. We've seen this trick already with startups developing in-store beacons that are probably as annoying as Google ads.
Another startup called F5 Future Store has raised $8.6 million for retail automation. However, the concept is definitely on the low-fi end of things. Quartz basically refers to the unmanned convenience stores as glorified vending machines. Everything is automated by machine, from the cooking to the cleaning, but it's hard to see where the AI piece fits in here. Just because you build a giant vending machine to sell cars out of, doesn't mean that you're using AI. Hopefully they'll extend the concept to more Chinese bathrooms soon, and we're not just talking about how to stop toilet paper bandits using AI. There is certainly no lack of unmanned store concepts popping up in China, with enough being launched that Tech Node was able to write about the Top 10 Chinese Unmanned Stores in 2017.
Startups Going Against Amazon
Of course, the Chinese and Amazon aren't the only ones investing in retail automation. We've told you previously about an automated coffee kiosk with high-end beans but without the high-brow hipster snobbery. Retail automation solutions at the checkout counter have been particularly focused on security. We previously found two companies—Everseen out of Ireland and Cambridge, Mass.-based StopLift—that use computer vision to prevent fraudulent behavior or errors by customers or employees. The next logical step is to apply similar tech to automate the checkout process because we all know how well the self-checkout line works when you leave it to the humans.
Founded just last year, San Francisco-based Standard Cognition has wrangled about $6 million in funding as of October 2017 for its retail automation system powered by computer vision. Cameras ID customers and the items they grab, charging them for the products as they leave the store. TechCrunch reports that Standard Recognition's AI does not use facial recognition and anonymizes the data it collects, storing it on-site rather than in the cloud.
Update 7/19/18: Standard Cognition raised another $5.5 million round which the company refers to as a "seed round extension" from CRV to continue their efforts in building a cashier-less checkout for bigger businesses.
Update 8/3/2018: Standard Cognition's cashier-free checkout (comparable to Amazon Go) is going live. It announced a deal with Japan's Paltac Corporation to roll out over 3,000 human-free storefronts by 2020.
Update 11/17//2018: Standard Cognition has raised $40 million in Series A funding led by Initialized Capital to replace retailers' cashiers with cameras. This brings the company's total funding to $50.6 million to date.
Another startup offering an AI retail automation solution with hopes of rivaling Amazon is Silicon Valley's AiFi, which was founded in 2016 and backed by $4 million in Seed money. The startup says its system can scale from small mom-and-pop places to large retailers. However, from what we've seen so far, most of these systems—relying heavily on cameras and object recognition technology—have focused on convenience store-sized establishments. AiFi says it can track up to 500 people and thousands of product SKUs, according to TechCrunch, which noted that the system also monitors behavior to detect naughty business such as shoplifting. Eventually, the same facial recognition tech will be able to send targeted promotional ads to customers via the system's app.
San Francisco-based Bodega, founded in 2016 with $2.5 million in disclosed funding, is more niche. It offers a grab-and-go AI retail automation system for places like apartment buildings or gyms. All customers need is an app and a code to access the goodies cabinet
A set of cameras inside the cabinet use computer vision to recognize products taken off the shelf, charging the customer's credit card once he or she walks away. Bodega also learns what sells and restocks accordingly.
A bootstrapped startup called Poly out of San Francisco promises not just to automate the checkout process with AI and cameras. Founded in 2015, the company says its system will track inventory (something both startups and big retailers like Walmart are starting to do with robots) and produce reams of data about shopper preferences. It will even notify shoppers when they pick up an expired item in the store. The company is also working on an augmented reality app that allows customers to learn about any product by pointing a smartphone camera at it. Fast Company did a full-on feature about the company last year.
We can all agree that the self-checkout experiment, like the War on Drugs, should end. It's time to let the machines take over. We've already noted some success in other areas of retail automation from startups that target inventory control and pricing. And we're starting to see automation in other sectors of retail, from warehousing to supply chain—themes we may hit in an upcoming article.
No company in the world spends more on research and development (R&D) than Amazon, who in 2017 dropped a ginormous $23 billion on R&D. While this would certainly give Amazon a technical advantage over any of the above startups, there's no indication the mega retailer has any plans to peddle its AI retail automation system to other customers, meaning there's quite an opportunity for startups in this wide-open market. Other retailers certainly don't have the technological expertise of Amazon, so if they want to find other tasks for their employees, they'll have to turn to third-party solutions. Or, as the trend is nowadays, snatch up startups before dreams of an IPO dance in their heads.
AI in Retail
The Autonomous Vehicle Companies in the Self-Driving Race
Ocado Group is Becoming a Technology Stock
A Smartphone Barcode Scanner From Scandit


text:
Sharp Dressed Fan: Billy Gibbons Of ZZ Top's Favourite Albums
Kiran Acharya , September 14th, 2016 08:38
As ZZ Top take their live greatest hits album on tour, their lead singer and guitarist Billy Gibbons talks Kiran Acharya through his top 13 LPs, setting aside some of his more well-worn classics in favour of recent favourites
Photograph courtesy of Phil Sharp
When you meet Billy Gibbons you ought to wear a good jacket and inexpensive shades as a way of letting him know that you know more than you're letting on. While 'Sharp Dressed Man', 'Cheap Sunglasses' and 'Gimme All Your Lovin'' spring immediately and unavoidably to mind, Gibbons' 45-year history with ZZ Top grants an unparalleled overview of rock & roll while also sustaining an appetite for new music that takes his Baker's Dozen off in some surprising directions.
"It's prudent to precede my list with a disclaimer," he says. "My choices are a little more recent than what might have been anticipated. People often ask about Jimmy Reed and Muddy Waters or even Howlin' Wolf, but it's safe to say that the list of great bluesmen, and the beautiful period of recording between 1949 and 1959, is already on the books."
As he describes his selection he gives the sense of a man who has seen worlds, from the earliest days of rock, the psychedelic '70s or the stadium-sized corporate successes of the '80s. Yet he remains on a quest as both a musician and listener, collaborating with everyone from Queens Of The Stone Age to Jeff Beck, who appears on Greatest Hits Live with a cover of the old American working-man's classic 'Sixteen Tons'. He even recently crossed paths with old friend Al Jourgensen, of industrial metal forefathers Ministry.
"I recorded a slide solo with Al," he says. "He was at the Sonic Ranch studio in El Paso, Texas. And he was doing the most… intriguing version of 'Sharp Dressed Man'. You could add that to my list of favourite ZZ Top interpretations."
Live! Greatest Hits From Around The World is out now on Suretone. ZZ Top play Koka Booth Amphitheatre in Cary, NC tonight before touring; for full details and tickets, head here. Click on his image below to begin scrolling through Billy's choices, which run in no particular order
« Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | ... | 13 | 14 | Next »
ZZ Top Announce UK Live Shows »
Getting To Grips With Roky Erickson: A Dr Rock Interview »
John Peel's Records: 'Z' Now Online »
The Desert Sessions - Vol. 11 & 12: Arrivederci Despair/ Tightwads & Nitwits & Critics & Heels »
Leman 24/7: Things Learned At Montreux Jazz Festival »
MORE FROM KIRAN ACHARYA
A Very Cool Thing To Have Done: Crunchy Frog At 25 »
Help Crowdfund Invisible Britain Portraits Book »
Products Of Hysteria: An Interview With Oxbow »
The Death Of Dissent: Richard H Kirk's Baker's Dozen »
Sharp Dressed Fan: Billy Gibbons Of ZZ Top's Favourite Albums »
MORE: BAKER'S DOZEN
Getting To The Point: Anthony Fantano's Favourite Albums »
The Old Country: Steve Von Till's Baker's Dozen »
Songs Of Praise: David Keenan's Baker's Dozen »
Lovely Jubbly: D Double E's Favourite Music »
Evidently Chicken Supreme: John Cooper Clarke's Favourite Songs »

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Pentacle arched design sterling silver Wiccan ring is woven with a vine connecting Earth to Sky and the Elements in this lovely ring.
Beautifully detailed sterling silver ring features a pentacle within an arched design with flowing vines. Ring is 5/8 inch high.
Item Number: PS-TR915 | Approximate Size (Inches): 0.50 wide x 0.01 deep x 0.75 high | Approximate Shipping Weight: 0.25 lbs.


text:
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ratio - Variable in class vue.forme.Point.PointEntrePoint

RAZ() - Method in class vue.DrawPanel

Raz le repere pour le mettre sur 0,0

RAZ_ZOOM() - Method in class vue.DrawPanel

Raz le zoom sur 1:1

RectangleVector - Class in vue.forme.Polygone

Created by ByTeK on 24/11/2014.

RectangleVector(BigDecimal, BigDecimal, int, int) - Constructor for class vue.forme.Polygone.RectangleVector

RectangleVector(PointVector, int, int) - Constructor for class vue.forme.Polygone.RectangleVector

removeDependance(FormeVue) - Method in class Modele.FormeVue

removePoint(PointVector) - Method in class Modele.FormeVue

Fonction signifiant a la figure qu'elle a perdu un point la constituant suite a un delete
 elle doit alors agir en conséquance.

removePoint(PointVector) - Method in class vue.forme.BezierVector

removePoint(PointVector) - Method in class vue.forme.Droite.DroiteVector

removePoint(PointVector) - Method in class vue.forme.ellipse.ArcCercleVector

removePoint(PointVector) - Method in class vue.forme.ellipse.CercleVector

removePoint(PointVector) - Method in class vue.forme.ellipse.OvalVector

removePoint(PointVector) - Method in class vue.forme.Point.PointEntrePoint

removePoint(PointVector) - Method in class vue.forme.Point.PointVector

removePoint(PointVector) - Method in class vue.forme.Polygone.PolygoneVector

removePoint(PointVector) - Method in class vue.forme.SegmentVector

Repere - Class in vue

Repere(int, int) - Constructor for class vue.Repere

returnBigDecimal(String) - Method in class Modele.Parser

Retourne la valeur en BigDecimal du string s

returnForme(String) - Method in class Modele.Parser

Retourne la forme dont le nom est le string s

returnPoint(String) - Method in class Modele.Parser

Retourne le Point nommé s ou un nouveau point de coordonné s

RightPane - Class in vue

Created by ByTeK on 11/11/2014.

RightPane() - Constructor for class vue.RightPane

rotate() - Method in class Modele.FormeVue

Fonction appeler dans l'update permetant d'un poser une rotation sur chacun des element du drawPanel
 si c'est dernier ont un angles rotation imposé.

rotation - Variable in class Modele.FormeVue

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Q: Can I make Generic uDisk write faster? I have a Generic uDisk/Flash disk (known as a fake flash drive). Write on 2,4MB/s, and read on 27MB/s. Tested on 20 sample with 20MB file and access 100 times (Linux Benchmark). I'm wishing I can make it run faster so I can create a LiveUSB on it or any bootable os.

A: There is no way to make the underlying hardware of a flash drive faster.
If your PC has a fast enough processor, you could compress the OS and data to make the apparent throughput higher. On another post on this site, Breakthrough writes:

Assuming your CPU, using some compression algorithm, can compress at C MB/s and decompress at D MB/s, and your hard drive has write speed W and read speed R. So long as C > W, you get a performance gain when writing, and so long as D > R, you get a performance gain when reading.

That said, most popular Linux LiveUSB distributions are already compressed, as they utilize a filesystem called SquashFS. If you've already tried flashing a LiveUSB distribution to this flash drive and its performance is unacceptable, you're pretty much out of luck.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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text:
<?php

	global $CONFIG;

	$file = $vars['entity'];

	$file_guid = $file->getGUID();
	$tags = $file->tags;
	$title = $file->title;
	$desc = $file->description;
	$owner = $vars['entity']->getOwnerEntity();
	$friendlytime = friendly_time($vars['entity']->time_created);

	$mime = $file->mimetype;

	if (get_context() == "search") { 	// Start search listing version

		if (get_input('search_viewtype') == "gallery") {
			echo "
";
			if ($vars['entity']->smallthumb) {
				echo "
" . $file->title . "
";
				echo "
getURL()}\">getGUID()}\" border=\"0\" />
";
				echo "
username}\">{$owner->username} {$friendlytime}
";

				//get the number of comments
				$numcomments = elgg_count_comments($vars['entity']);
				if ($numcomments)
					echo "
getURL()}\">" . sprintf(elgg_echo("comments")) . " (" . $numcomments . ")
";

				//if the user can edit, display edit and delete links
				if ($file->canEdit()) {
					echo "

";
					echo "getGUID()}\">" . elgg_echo('edit') . " ";
					echo elgg_view('output/confirmlink',array(

							'href' => $vars['url'] . "action/file/delete?file=" . $file->getGUID(),
							'text' => elgg_echo("delete"),
							'confirm' => elgg_echo("file:delete:confirm"),

						));
					echo "

";
				}

			} else {
				echo "
{$title}
";
				echo "getURL()}\">" . elgg_view("file/icon", array("mimetype" => $mime, 'thumbnail' => $file->thumbnail, 'file_guid' => $file_guid, 'size' => 'large')) . "";
				echo "
username}\">{$owner->name} {$friendlytime}
";
				//get the number of comments
				$numcomments = elgg_count_comments($file);
				if ($numcomments)
					echo "
getURL()}\">" . sprintf(elgg_echo("comments")) . " (" . $numcomments . ")
";

			}
			echo "
";
			// echo elgg_view("search/gallery",array('info' => $info, 'icon' => $icon));

		} else {

			$info = "
 getURL()}\">{$title}
";
			$info .= "
username}\">{$owner->name} {$friendlytime}";
			$numcomments = elgg_count_comments($file);
			if ($numcomments)
				$info .= ", getURL()}\">" . sprintf(elgg_echo("comments")) . " (" . $numcomments . ")";
			$info .= "
";

			// $icon = elgg_view("profile/icon",array('entity' => $owner, 'size' => 'small'));
			$icon = "getURL()}\">" . elgg_view("file/icon", array("mimetype" => $mime, 'thumbnail' => $file->thumbnail, 'file_guid' => $file_guid, 'size' => 'small')) . "";

			echo elgg_view_listing($icon, $info);

		}

	} else {							// Start main version

?>

					<a href="<?php echo $vars['url']; ?>action/file/download?file_guid=<?php echo $file_guid; ?>"><?php

						echo elgg_view("file/icon", array("mimetype" => $mime, 'thumbnail' => $file->thumbnail, 'file_guid' => $file_guid));

					?>

		<?php
			//get the user and a link to their gallery
			$user_gallery = $vars['url'] . "mod/file/search.php?md_type=simpletype&subtype=file&tag=image&owner_guid=" . $owner->guid . "&search_viewtype=gallery";
		?>

<a href="<?php echo $user_gallery; ?>"><?php echo sprintf(elgg_echo("file:user:gallery"),''); ?>

<a href="<?php echo $file->getURL(); ?>"><?php echo $title; ?>

				<?php

					echo elgg_view("profile/icon",array('entity' => $owner, 'size' => 'tiny'));

				?>

<a href="<?php echo $vars['url']; ?>pg/file/<?php echo $owner->username; ?>"><?php echo $owner->name; ?>

				<?php echo $friendlytime; ?>

<?php echo elgg_view('output/longtext', array('value' => $desc)); ?>

<?php

		if (!empty($tags)) {

?>

<?php

					echo elgg_view('output/tags',array('value' => $tags));

				?>

<?php
		}

		$categories = elgg_view('categories/view',$vars);
		if (!empty($categories)) {
?>

			<?php

				echo $categories;

			?>

<?php
		}

?>

		<?php
			if (elgg_view_exists('file/specialcontent/' . $mime)) {
				echo "
".elgg_view('file/specialcontent/' . $mime, $vars)."
";
			} else if (elgg_view_exists("file/specialcontent/" . substr($mime,0,strpos($mime,'/')) . "/default")) {
				echo "
".elgg_view("file/specialcontent/" . substr($mime,0,strpos($mime,'/')) . "/default", $vars)."
";
			}

		?>

<a href="<?php echo $vars['url']; ?>action/file/download?file_guid=<?php echo $file_guid; ?>"><?php echo elgg_echo("file:download"); ?>

<?php

	if ($file->canEdit()) {
?>

					<a href="<?php echo $vars['url']; ?>mod/file/edit.php?file_guid=<?php echo $file->getGUID(); ?>"><?php echo elgg_echo('edit'); ?>
					<?php
						echo elgg_view('output/confirmlink',array(

							'href' => $vars['url'] . "action/file/delete?file=" . $file->getGUID(),
							'text' => elgg_echo("delete"),
							'confirm' => elgg_echo("file:delete:confirm"),

						));
					?>

<?php
	}

?>

<?php

	if ($vars['full']) {

		echo elgg_view_comments($file);

	}

?>

<?php

	}

?>


text:
poi
===

Optimised and extended version of Apache POI Framework


text:
English in the Movies by David Crystal
By Victoria Willingale, on November 29th, 2018%
I hear pop songs in English in every country I visit. Just back from a lecture tour around Italy, and I heard them in taxis, in hotels playing background music, and in cars passing in the street with the radio on loud – in every city. Often, the listeners are singing along, demonstrating a level of English ability that is sometimes well beyond their general level of competence. It's a great language-learning tool – and I've had exactly the same experience in my own encounter with other languages. When I was learning Portuguese in Brazil, my samba-ese far exceeded by general skill. But the musical dimension had all sorts of benefits. It gave me confidence. I felt I was beginning to identify with the culture. And I could drop musical quotations into my basic Portuguese that delighted both me and my hosts.
So why isn't there always the same experience in the cinema? On my Italy tour, I was in a different hotel every night, and occasionally flicked through the TV channels. I glimpsed many English-language films, and every one was dubbed into Italian. What an opportunity missed! Same thing happened in Germany. I love watching foreign films in their original languages, with English sub-titles. It's a totally different experience. One of my favourite films is La Nuit Americaine – Day for Night – and I've watched it both in French and dubbed into English. There's something bizarre about seeing people with distinctively French expressions and gestures interacting with English voices. And my Italian friends on this trip told me they felt exactly the same watching English-language movies dubbed in Italian.
But the climate may be changing, and in this week of the launch of the third edition of CEEL I read news reports from different countries proudly announcing that it's now possible to watch English-language films in the original language. And Italy is among the headlines! The website Wanted in Rome has a report about the 'growing number of cinemas in Rome showing movies in their original English-language versions, with subtitles in Italian', and lists eighteen of them. In Spain, Murcia Today reports that the Hornillo multicine shows Spanish-language films throughout the week, but every Tuesday shows English language originals – this week on 27 November The Girl in the Spider's Web and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society. Might these initiatives spill over into television?
The mood seems to have been building up this year. I don't recall such developments making online headlines before. In March, a teacher of English at a lycée in the town of Béziers, southern France launched a petition on Change.org calling for an end to the dubbing of foreign films and TV series and asking for all foreign programmes broadcast in their original version. She commented: 'People say the French have problems with foreign languages but it is because they do not have the opportunity to hear them regularly enough.' And the headline of the report is sympathetic: 'Why it's time France stopped dubbing English-language films and TV series'. For adults, of course, not for kids who are still learning to read.
It's already happened in some countries. A report last year in Dutch Review headed 'Why are the Dutch so good at speaking English?' comments:
'Fact is that the Dutch get in touch with the English language early in life through television. They don't dub any movies or series, and contrary to other European countries like Spain, Germany or France you can watch everything on TV in original language while reading the subtitles in Dutch. This means that the kids in the Netherlands have a much more natural approach when it comes to learning and speaking English propelling them well ahead of their peers in other countries.'
I've found similar comments in relation to Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. And as a regular visitor to the Netherlands (I have a daughter living there) I have to concur with the reporter. But my remarks are anecdotal. It would be really interesting to see a current survey on dubbing practices worldwide – and not just for English, but for all languages. I remember reading an English Proficiency Index report a few years ago which pointed out parallels between proficiency and subtitling. There wasn't a total correlation (e.g. in Poland and Germany), and there were some complicated scenarios in places where the choice of 'subs or dubs' raises issues of endangerment and identity (such as Quebec). Practices evidently vary greatly worldwide.
David Crystal is one of the world's foremost authorities on language, having published extensively over the past fifty years on his research work in English language studies. An internationally renowned writer, editor, lecturer, and broadcaster, he received an OBE in 1995 for his services to the study and teaching of the English language. He is Honoury Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor, and was made a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 2000. David lives in Holyhead, Wales, where he is the director of the Ucheldre Centre, a multi-purpose arts and exhibition centre.
David Crystal's third edition of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of English Langauge, with additional features such as audio recordings is now available. Explore the David Crystal Collection which includes these resources, free articles, a competition and more.
Leave a comment Applied Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition, Bilingualism & Multilingualism, Books, Language and Cognition, Sociolinguistics, Textbooks, The Evolution of Language David Crystal, dubbing, English, English language teaching, foreign films, grammar, language learning, movies, subtitles
The brave new world of emoji: Why and how has emoji taken the world by storm?
By James McKellar, on July 15th, 2016%
Blog post written by Cambridge author Vyvyan Evans.
An emoji is a glyph encoded in fonts, like other characters, for use in electronic communication. It's especially prevalent in digital messaging and social media. An emoji, or 'picture character', is a visual representation of a feeling, idea, entity, status or event. From a historical perspective, the first emojis were developed in the late 1990s in Japan for use in the world's first mobile phone internet system. There were originally 176, very crude by today's standards.
Early emoji faces
In 2009, the California-based Unicode Consortium, which specifies the international standard for the representation of text across modern digital computing and communication platforms, sanctioned 722 emojis. The Unicode approved emojis became available to software developers by 2010, and a global phenomenon was born. Today, there are a little over 1,200 emojis available.
The new universal 'language'?
While emoji is not, strictly speaking, a language, in the way that say, English, French or Japanese are languages, it is certainly a powerful system of communication. English is often said to be the world's global language, so a comparison is instructive.
English has 335 million native speakers, with a further 505 million speakers who use it as a second language. It's the primary or official language in 101 countries, from Canada to Cameroon, and from Malta to Malawi – far outstripping any other language. It has been transplanted far from its point of origin – a small country, on a small island – spreading far beyond English shores. But more than the range, English has steadily gained ground in almost all areas of international communication: from commerce, to diplomacy, from aviation to academic publishing, serving as a global Lingua Franca.
But in comparison, emoji dwarfs even the reach of English. The driver for the staggering adoption of emoji has been the advent of mobile computing, especially the smartphone. Emoji was introduced as an international keyboard in Apple's operating system (iOS) in October 2011. And by July 2013 it had been introduced across most Android operating platforms.
There are different measures for assessing the stratospheric rise of emoji. One factor has been the rapid adoption of smartphones. Today one quarter of the world's global population owns a smartphone; and based on a survey of mobile computing habits in 41 countries it is estimated that today there are over 2 billion smartphone users with 31% of the global population accessing the internet by smartphone. In terms of specific countries, China exceeded 500 million smartphones during the course of 2014, and it is estimated that India will have over 200 million smartphone users this year, and in the USA the same figure will be achieved by 2017, when 65% of the population of the United States will own a smartphone.[i] In terms of smartphones alone, some 41.5 billion text messages are sent globally every day, using around 6 billion emojis—figures that are mindboggling.[ii]
Emoji all around us
Today emoji is seemingly everywhere, having spread far beyond the messaging systems it was developed for. The New York Subway has now introduced a system, using emoji, to advise passengers of the status of particular subway lines: whether trains are running normally or not. As the NY City website explains: "We're trying to estimate agony on the NYC subway by monitoring time between trains and adding unhappy points for stations typically crowded at rush hour." [iii] Here's an example:
Reprinted from the WNYC website
Even an institution as august as the BBC is not immune. Each Friday, the Newsbeat page on the BBC website—associated with BBC Radio 1 and aimed at younger listeners—publishes the news in emoji. Radio listeners are invited to guess what the headline means. See whether you can figure out which headline this emoji 'sentence' relates to:
Four climbers find what they think is a Dodo chick egg. But it's not. The bird has been extinct for 450 years.
One in four people don't know the Dodo is extinct, a poll finds.
Four children win a science competition to genetically recreate the Dodo.
(The correct answer is 2).
Moreover, the literary canon is not excluded: a visual designer with a passion for emoji has translated Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, a book of 27,500 or so words, into a pictorial narrative, consisting of around 25,000 emoji.[iv] Some example emoji 'sentences' are below:
Frivolous or the future?
A common question that people ask is whether anyone—you or I—can simply create their own emojis? The short answer is yes. For instance, Finland, on behalf of the Finnish people, has created its own set of national emojis that express Finnish identity. These include emojis of people in saunas, of a Nokia phone and of a headbanger.
These are a computer generated emojis made available by Finland's Foreign Ministry on Wednesday Nov. 4, 2015. Finland is launching a series of 'national emojis' that include people sweating in saunas, classic Nokia phones and heavy metal head-bangers. Petra Theman from the Finnish Foreign Ministry says the emojis will be released as a way to promote the country's image abroad and are based on themes associated with Finland. (Finnish Foreign Ministry via AP)
Finnish national emojis
But while Finland was the first country in the world to embrace its national identity through emojis, you or I won't be able to text one another the headbanger emoji anytime soon. And that's because the Finnish emojis have not been officially sanctioned by the Unicode Consortium—and Finland has no plans to submit them for consideration.
A new emoji has to meet various criteria to become a candidate emoji. And only after a lengthy vetting process, taking around 18 months, does a successful candidate emoji pass muster. Even then, it can take still longer for a newly sanctioned emoji to make it onto our digital keyboards – once approved, emojis can take several operating system – updates, and sometimes several years, to make it onto a smartphone or tablet computer near you. So, for now, at least, Finland's bespoke emojis are classed as 'stickers': bespoke images that have to be downloaded as part of an app, in order to be inserted them into text messages.
On January 25th 2016, a Chinese – American businesswoman, YiYing Lu, from San Francisco, succeeded where Finland had declined to tread. Supported by a publically-funded kickstarter campaign, Lu succeeded in having a dumpling achieve official emoji candidate status. And if successful, the proposed dumpling is set to become a bona fide emoji by the end of 2017. In so doing, it would join a growing catalogue of food emojis, including pizza, hamburger, doughnuts and even a taco glyph.
The proposed dumpling emoji. From The Dumpling Project.
The entire emoji vetting process is controlled by a handful of American multinational corporations, based in California. And there are strict qualifying criteria for new emojis: they may not depict persons living or dead, nor deities, for instance. This is why there is no Buddha, or Elvis emojis. Moreover, a candidate emoji must be deemed to have widespread appeal. On this score, the proposal for a dumpling emoji looks to be a strong candidate. A dumpling – a dough filled food parcel – is popular around the world, with exemplars ranging from Italian ravioli to Russian pelmeni, to Japanese gyoza. In Argentina there is empanadas, Jewish cuisine has kreplach, in Korea there is madoo and China has popstickers. But when Lu, an aficionado of Chinese dumplings, attempted to text a friend about the dish, she noticed there wasn't an emoji she could use.
In early 2016, the fact that the dumpling had officially achieved candidate emoji status in California hit the headlines around the world, from New York, to London, to Beijing; even the broadcast media got in on the act. I was invited onto BBC Radio to discuss the success of the Dumpling Kickstarter project, headlining with Lu herself. The Kickstarter campaign – to raise the necessary funds to prepare the proposal – had been a self-evident success, achieving over $12,000 and reaching its target within a few hours of going live. But the headlines beg the very question: why all the fuss about dumplings? Isn't this simply frivolity gone mad, an expensive bit of silliness?
On the contrary: emoji matters. The Dumpling Project stands for far more than a simplistic bid to have the favourite food of a Bay area business woman become sanctioned as an emoji. It is an instance of internet democracy at work: indeed, the slogan of the project was 'emoji for the people, by the people'.
One reason why emoji matters is the following; love it or loathe it, emoji is today the world's global form of communication. A quarter of the world's population owns a smartphone, and over 80% of adult smartphone users regularly use emoji, with figures likely to be far higher for under 18s. In short, most of the world's mobile computing users use emoji much of the time. And yet, the catalogue of emojis that show up on our smartphones and tablet computers – the vocabulary that connects 2 billion people – is controlled by a handful of American multinationals – eight of the eleven full members of the Unicode Consortium are American: Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, Google, Facebook and Yahoo. Moreover, the committee reps of these tech companies are overwhelmingly white, male, and computer engineers – hardly representative of the diversity exhibited by the global users of emojis. Indeed, as of 2015, the majority of food emojis were associated with North American culture, with some throwbacks to the Japanese origins of emoji (such as a sushi emoji).
Hence, one motivation for the Dumpling Project was to ensure better representation. Of course, on its own, a campaign and proposal for a new food emoji cannot do much. But as an appeal to global cultural and culinary diversity, and as call for better representation of this diversity, the dumpling is a powerful emblem. Emoji began as a bizarre little known North Asian phenomenon; since, control has come to rest in the hands of American corporate giants. Dumplings, on the other hand, in their various shapes and guises are truly international and get at the global nature of emoji.
Perhaps more than anything, the Dumpling Project is fun; and in terms of emoji, a sense of fun is the watchword. While these colourful glyphs add a dollop of personality to our digital messaging, the Dumpling Project makes a powerful point without resorting to burning either bras or effigies. It avoids gender, religion or politics in conveying a simple message about inclusiveness in the world's most widely used form of communication. And in the process, it provides us with an object lesson in the unifying and non – threatening nature of emoji. Perhaps the world can, indeed, be united for the better by this new, quasi-universal form of communication.
Communication and emotional intelligence
Setting aside dumplings, one of the serious questions surrounding the rise and rise of emoji is this: Why has the uptake of emoji grown exponentially: why is a truly global system of communication? Some see emoji as little more than an adolescent grunt, taking us back to the dark ages of illiteracy. But this prejudice fundamentally misunderstands the nature of communication. And in so doing it radically underestimates the potentially powerful and beneficial role of emoji in the digital age as a communication and educational tool.
All too often we think of language as the mover and the shaker in our everyday world of meaning. But, in actual fact, most of the meaning we convey and glean in our everyday social encounters, comes from nonverbal cues. In the spoken medium, gesture, facial expression, body language and speech intonation provide a means of qualifying and adjusting the message conveyed by the words. A facial wink or smile nuances the language, providing a crucial contextualisation cue, aiding our understanding of the spoken word. And intonation not only 'punctuates' our spoken language—there are no white spaces and full – stops in speech that help us identify where words begin and sentences end—intonation even provides 'missing' information not otherwise conveyed by the words.
Much of our communication is nonverbal. Take gesture: our gestures are minutely choreographed to co-occur with our spoken words. And we seem unable to suppress them. Watch someone on the telephone; they'll be gesticulating away, despite their gestures being unseen by the person on the other end of the line. Indeed, if gestures are suppressed, in lab settings say, then our speech actually becomes less fluent. We need to gesture to be able to speak properly. And, by some accounts, gesture may have even been the route that language took in its evolutionary emergence.
Eye contact is another powerful signal we use in our everyday encounters. We use it to manage our spoken interactions with others. Speakers avert their gaze from an addressee when talking, but establish eye contact to signal the end of their utterance. We gaze at our addressee to solicit feedback, but avert our gaze when we disapprove of what they are saying. We also glance at our addressee to emphasise a point we're making.
Eye gaze, gesture, facial expression, and speech prosody are powerful nonverbal cues that convey meaning; they enable us to express our emotional selves, as well as providing an effective and dynamic means of managing our interactions on a moment by moment time – scale. Face – to – face interaction is multimodal, with meaning conveyed in multiple, overlapping and complementary ways. This provides a rich communicative environment, with multiple cues for coordinating and managing our spoken interactions.
Digital communication increasingly provides us with an important channel of communication in our increasingly connected 21st century social and professional lives. But the rich, communicative context available in face-to-face encounters is largely absent. Digital text alone is impoverished and emotionally arid. Digital communication, seemingly, possesses the power to strip all forms of nuanced expression even from the best of us. But here emoji can help: it fulfils a similar function in digital communication to gesture, body language and intonation, in spoken communication. Emoji, in text messaging and other forms of digital communication, enables us to better express tone and provide emotional cues to better manage the ongoing flow of information, and to interpret what the words are meant to convey.
It is no fluke, therefore, that I have found, in my research on emoji usage in the UK, commissioned by TalkTalk Mobile, that 72% of British 18-25 year olds believe that emoji make them better at expressing their feelings. Far from leading to a drop in standards, emoji are making people – especially the young – better communicators in their digital lives.
[i] http://www.emarketer.com/Article/2-Billion-Consumers-Worldwide-Smartphones-by-2016/1011694#sthash.p0P9KU38.dpuf
[ii] Swyftkey April 2015
[iii] http://www.wnyc.org/story/your-subway-agony/ (accessed 8th July 2015 7.30pm BST).
[iv] http://joehale.bigcartel.com/product/wonderland-emoji-poster
Leave a comment Applied Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition, Bilingualism & Multilingualism, Historical Linguistics, Language and Cognition, Sociolinguistics, Speech and Language therapy, The Evolution of Language emoji, linguistics
The Study of Language by George Yule | 5th Edition
By admin, on March 21st, 2014%
The Study of Language has proven itself to be the student and instructor choice for first courses in language and linguistics because of its accessible approach to, what is often, a complicated subject. In every edition, readers have praised the book for being easy to follow, simple to understand, and fun to read, with its quirky anecdotes and examples of languages from around the world. Now in its fifth edition, it is further strengthened by the addition of new student 'tasks' (guiding readers to connect theory to real-world scenarios), including examples from even more foreign languages, and updating the text to reflect the most current linguistic theory. We will also be offering an enriched learning experience with our new enhanced eBook (publishing in Autumn), which will include pop-up glossary terms, embedded audio and interactive questioning. All of these features make this the most student-friendly edition of the textbook yet.
Paragraph above by Valerie Appleby, Development Editor, Cambridge University Press
9 comments Applied Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition, Bilingualism & Multilingualism, Books, Discourse Analysis, Free Resources, Grammar and Syntax, Historical Linguistics, Language and Cognition, Media, New Publications, Semantics and Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics, Textbooks, The Evolution of Language George Yule, Inforgraphic, Introduction to Linguistics, Language, linguistics, Textbook, The Study of Language
Romanian Words of Turkish Origin
By admin, on August 19th, 2013%
by Julie Tetel Andresen
Duke University, North Carolina
My favorite words in Romanian are those of Turkish origin. Because parts of present-day Romania were under Ottoman rule for a long time, it's natural that Romanian would have lexical borrowings from Turkish. One is the word for tulip. Now, tulips are not native to Holland. They are native to Central Asia, and in the eighteenth century there was a craze for tulips at the Ottoman court, and images of tulips could be found on clothing and furniture, while real tulips flourished in gardens and parks. Still today the tulip is a symbol for Turkey. The English word 'tulip' comes from the Turkish word tulbend 'turban' because the flower resembles the shape of a turban. However, the Turkish word is lâle, and the Romanian word is lalea.
Why do I like this word? Because it's fun to say, especially in the plural: 'tulips' is lalele and 'the tulips' is lalelele. There's 'coffee' cafea, 'coffees' cafele, and 'coffees' cafelele. Same goes for 'hinge' balama, plural 'hinges' balamale and 'the hinges' balamalele and for 'crane (piece of construction equipment)' macara, 'cranes' macarale and 'cranes' macaralele. Not all Turkish borrowings have the phonetic form that generates these plurals, and not all words in Romanian with this plural type come from Turkish, but most of them do.
The other reason I like Turkish borrowings in Romanian is they often come with nice semantic twists. The word belea is usually used in the plural belele and means 'troubles,' which is tinged almost, but not quite, with a sense of the ridiculous. When I think of 'my troubles' as belelele mele, they don't seem so bad. And what could be better than the word beizadea 'son of a bei, a high ranking Turkish official'? It would never be used in Romanian as a compliment, and we need such a word in English, because entitled spoiled brat doesn't quite cover it.
Finally, there's the Romanian word for 'neighborhood, suburb' mahala, and it, too, is freighted with negative connotations. The politică de mahala, which includes personal attacks and reckless speech, would characterize much of what's gone on in Washington DC is recent years. Those readers with knowledge of Arabic will recognize the root halla 'to lodge' with the place prefix ma-, making a word that means something like 'building.' So, the Turkish borrowing is itself a borrowing from Arabic. This word was also borrowed into Persian and is immortalized in the name Taj Mahal, which means in Persian 'best of buildings.' So, in the western extent of this etymon, we have a down-market usage, while in the eastern extent, we find something beautiful. Romania has its beauties, too. They're found in the language.
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By admin, on November 21st, 2012%
3 comments The Evolution of Language evolution of language, Language, linguistics, new books
By admin, on November 5th, 2012%
Part 3: Mead's Loop (1).
Part 1 of this series put forth the idea that language is inseparable from imagery, in particular the imagery of gesture, and that theories of language origin can be judged by how well they predict this gesture–speech unity. The second part applied the test to a widely held origin theory, gesture-first, and found it wanting – doubly so, in fact. This part applies the test to a new hypothesis, which I call "Mead's Loop."
Mead's Loop holds that gesture was essential in the origin of language. In this it agrees with gesture-first, but differs in that, it says, gesture and speech had to be naturally selected together. Rather than gesture-first (or speech-first), gesture and speech were what Liesbet Quaeghebeur, philosopher at the University of Antwerp, has called "equiprimordial," the antithesis of gesture- or speech-first.
Mead's Loop rests upon an idea from the early 20th Century philosopher, George Herbert Mead, formulated as an origin hypothesis to portray what, some one-half to one million years ago, emerged in the evolution of the human brain. It posits the mirror neuron circuits that gesture-first also assumes, but again with a difference. Mirror neurons in Mead's Loop were "twisted" to respond to one's own gestures as if they were from someone else.
Mirror neurons have been directly recorded in monkeys and reside supposedly in all primate brains, including ours. Part 2 quoted Rizzolatti's and Arbib's definition. A Wikipedia article also defines it succinctly: "[a] mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another." I call these mirror neurons "straight," to distinguish them from Mead's Loop. Note what they provide. The significance of the straight mirror neuron response is that of the action it mimics. For example, seeing someone picking up a treat, the mirror neuron repeats this action, with its meaning. The action of another is repeated (not necessarily overtly but at the orchestration level) and it becomes one's own. If the mirror neuron circuit produces a gesture it will be a mimicked action like the one perceived. It in fact resembles pantomime, a gesture, as we saw in Part 2, that systematically blocks gesture–speech unities.
Mead's Loop refers to a posited new adaptation, a thought-language-hand link, located at least in part in the area now called Broca's Area (other brain areas also must have been involved). Here is the twist: G. H. Mead said that a gesture is meaningful when it evokes the same response in the one making it as it evokes in the one receiving it. For evolution, this suggests that mirror neurons came to bring one's own gesture imagery and its significance into Broca'a Area, the motor area for orchestrating actions including speech and gesture. While straight mirror neurons reproduce the actions of another, with meanings that are those of the actions, the Mead's Loop twist responds to one's own gestures as if from another, and brings different meanings into the action-orchestration areas of the brain, those of the gestures.
The Mead's Loop twist, because it brings the gesture's meaning into the orchestration process, merges and synchronizes speech with gesture at points where they co-express the same idea. Hence the unity: it is built in. In all of this the gesture is fundamental. Mead's Loop creates "new actions," actions orchestrated under significances other than their practical goal-directed meanings – those of the gestures that Mead's Loop imports. Because Mead's Loop gave gestures the power to orchestrate speech, Mead's Loop was the beginning of everything in language.
These achievements opened a door to language dynamically. Mead's Loop had both semiotic and motor effects:
Semiotically, it brought the gesture's meaning into the mirror neuron area. Mirror neurons no longer were confined to the semiosis of actions. One's own gestures entered, opening action control to the imagery of gesture. Extended by metaphoricity, the significance of imagery is unlimited. So from this one change, the meaning potential of language moved away from only action and expanded vastly.
At the motor level, in the areas of the brain where speech movements are orchestrated, Mead's Loop enabled significant imagery – gesture – to "chunk" motor control of the vocal tract and diaphragm, and laid the foundation of the GP.
How does Mead's Loop produce gesture-speech unity? As mentioned, it was built in from the start. The evolutionary step was a self-response by mirror neurons. Mirror neurons complete Mead's loop in a part of the brain where action sequences are organized – two kinds of sequential actions, speech and gesture, converging, with meaningful imagery the integral component. Co-opting sequential actions by a socially referenced stimulus (imagery) provides a new kind of action in the vocal tract – speech, with its own movements, timing, tongue postures, and breathing. It thus explains, which gesture-first could not explain, why gesture and speech are unified.
By treating imagery as a social stimulus Mead's loop also explains why gestures occur preferentially in a social context of some kind (face-to-face, on the phone, but not alone talking to a tape recorder).
But was the twist needed? It was, because the gesture, although emanating with full meaning from the same brain area as speech, does not unite with it. It is neither synchronous nor co-expressive. It is incomplete. Gesture–speech unity happens only when the gesture gets a self-response via Mead's Loop and becomes able to orchestrate speech movements (not sequentially, but self-response is an essential aspect of the gesture's meaning, the meaning under which speech and gesture combine). This was Mead's insight. He recognized that gesture (and speech) have fundamentally a social character and, to be meaningful, must have a social/public presence: the gesture, he said, evokes the same response in the one making it as in the one receiving it. With Mead's Loop, this occurs when the one making and the one receiving are the same; this is the "twist"; then the gesture is a meaningful and socially pertinent event, with the potential to connect to everything else in language dynamically. It orchestrates vocal and manual movements.
Then speech passes from "display" (of which chimps are capable) to "communicating messages to the other" (a phrase from Werner & Kaplan).
Straight mirror neurons do not respond because there is no external action; only the "twist" can self-respond in this way.
A self-response to the gesture can pick up other meanings as well, and these can further cement gesture–speech unity. In the process the gesture also changes to meet its role of forming a unit with speech. In Part 4 of this series I'll show gestures reshaped by gesture–speech unity.
Mead's Loop also gains substance for a reason identified by Merleau-Ponty: "Language … presents or rather it is the subject's taking up of a position in the world of his meanings. (p. 193). Via Mead's Loop and its social reference, the gesture takes up its position in the world of meanings as well. This move equally reshapes the gesture, in keeping with gesture–speech unity.
That Mead's Loop gave one's gestures a public, social significance had importance for another reason, natural selection. It meant that the Mead's Loop twist was adaptive in social-interactive situations (so those favorites, "man-the-tool-maker" and "man-the-hunter," would be incidental to language origin, effective insofar as they are also social but not significant in themselves). The social reference gave adults, in particular mothers inculcating cultural norms in infants, the sense of being an instructor as opposed to being just a doer with an onlooker (which is what happens with chimpanzees). Entire cultural practices of human childrearing depend upon this sense. The adult must be sensitive to her own gestures as social/public actions. Hence the adaptiveness of Mead's Loop. Sensing actions as social impacts the next generation of children who, as a result of it, do better at coping, and pass it on.
Origin of syntax. To many the origin of patterned language, of syntax, is the crux of the origin of language as a whole. How, when, or even why syntax emerged is far from obvious. Proposals range from a "big bang" single mutation, through cultural practices such as ritual or grooming, to no special sources at all, just a natural by-product of human intelligence in general. Whatever it was, over eons it has led to vast crosslinguistic diversity. I follow Eric Lenneberg and affirm that syntax rests on a biological foundation, hence is a topic in the origin of language.
The basic idea stemming from Mead's Loop is that words and syntax are continuations of GPs. They and GPs are linked organically. I seek the natural selection of syntax (the general ability, not specific constructions, although some constructions also could have been naturally selected) in three places – the nature of the GP and its unpacking; the new paths this opened; and shareability. These in turn suggest three kinds of adaptive advantages.
First, syntax is crucial for a GP dialectic. Without morphs and combinations of morphs there cannot be a semiotic opposition to gesture imagery.
Second and linked, syntax stabilizes the dialectic. It is the resting point par excellence.
Third, syntax helps make language shareable in sociocultural encounters.
Any or all of these factors could have favored an ability to form syntactic patterns, defined generally as creating meaningful wholes out of segmented elements (morphs); meeting standards of form; providing cultural identity; learning this system, and transmitting and maintaining it over space and time. We are focusing on the dynamic dimension of language. This dimension crosscuts the static and is not reducible to it (nor vice versa, the static is not reducible to the dynamic; they are two dimensions, not one dimension in two forms).
That the static and dynamic arose together, were equiprimordial, is explained by Mead's Loop's built-in social referencing, combined with gesture imagery. From this vantage point, we can claim that words and sentences continue the evolution of the GP. Contrary to traditions both philological and Biblical, language did not begin with a "first word." Words emerged from GPs. There was an emerging ability to differentiate newsworthy points in contexts; a first gesture–speech unit but not a first word.
The paradox of an emerging syntax is that it is almost invisible in current humans. Children learn their language with speed, but they are given a language, not inventing one. When gestures are forced to be the sole medium of communication in experiments, however, they quickly develop linguistic values original to the speaker and the situation, not borrowed from an existing language, including novel axes of selection (paradigmatic values) and combination (syntagmatic values), suggesting a faculty for syntactic innovation in current-day humans. It is this hidden ability we propose that arose out of GPs at the origin.
Whence such a faculty for syntactic invention? An important insight is "shareability" from a 1983 paper by Jennifer Freyd. To share information imposes a "discreteness filter" such that the semiotic properties of words (discreteness) and word combinations arise. Shareability would have existed at the dawn. It also existed in the gesture-communication experiments, so conditions for new word forms and combinations existed in both. Words and combinations of words are part of the GP's imagery-language dialectic, both opposing codified linguistic form to gesture semiotically, and providing a dialectic stop-order through unpacking.
GPs and syntax thus emerged together according to Mead's Loop, and could do so because in Mead's Loop the gesture assumes the guise of a social other and invites shareability from the beginning. Here began the static dimension of language.
Most of the static dimension, however, is not biological but socio-cultural and historical, shaped over time. To have forms that are repeatable, standardized, and non-context-bound makes them durable and portable from encounter to encounter, where they can be reshaped by intragroup and intergroup encounters, including migrations where newcomers encounter existing populations (there may be spontaneous "mutations" beyond encounters as well).
This in itself would have given syntactic innovation adaptive value and replaced temporal order syntax with morph elaborations, releasing static structure meanings from temporal sequence. The primordial syntax according to Mead's Loop was mapping meanings onto temporal sequences. The orchestration of actions under some significance with shareability allots meaning fragments to ordered segments of time. The response to encounters is to shake up this temporal syntax. Given gesture–speech unity, gestures change as well (the examples in the fourth part of this series illustrate this as well).
The cumulative effect would have been to liberate temporal sequence for other expressive functions, some of which may also take part in imagery–language dialectics on muliple levels. Edward Sapir long ago divided the world's languages according to how they combine meanings into single words – analytic or isolating, relying on temporal sequence (e.g., Chinese), synthetic, with some liberation (e.g., Latin), or polysynthetic, with much freedom (e.g., Inuit), which reflect degrees of adornment of the basic brain orchestration plan (and English, with its relatively fixed word orders, is one of the less adorned).
Rethinking language as action control. Speech according to Mead's Loop, among other things, is thus a culturally mandated action, orchestrated by imagery. Action is a target of natural selection in any case, and in the selection scenario where Mead's Loop had adaptability, adults inculcating cultural norms in infants, the overt actions of the adults fed natural selection. Linguistic standards are not only about "good forms" but also about "good actions." The discovery of the FOXP2 gene points to the centrality of action control at the foundation of language. The mutation in the KE family that led to its discovery affects fine motor control, speech articulation and other actions, as well as syntax. As a gene affecting fine-tuned action control, it would influence the raw material on which Mead's Loop and its new form of action worked (the Mead's Loop innovation itself would be something else genetically). The gene (actually, a transcription factor, a genetic "on-off" switch), which differs in the human version compared to that in chimps, has undergone accelerated evolution and when implanted into engineered mice changes vocalization. Taking this lead, we can consider syntax as a form of culturally authorized action control of the vocal organs, the hands and other body parts.
Brain model. The language centers of the brain have classically been regarded as just two, Wernicke's and Broca's areas. But if we are on the right track with Mead's Loop, many other areas of the brain are involved and are equally "language areas." Broca's Area itself is not a "language area" but a region for complex action orchestration under various significances. Typical item-recognition, memory and production tests would not tap these other brain regions, but discourse, conversation, play, work, and the exigencies of language in daily life (where language originated) would. Broca's area may be the convergence point of Mead's Loop and the imagery–language dialectic, including unpacking, but other areas – the left rear hemisphere (categorial content in GPs), the right hemisphere (imagery and metaphor), and the prefrontal cortex (the alternatives a GP differentiates) – can equally be called the "language areas" of the brain. Thought-language-hand links tie them together when the dynamic dimension of language is engaged.
Selection scenario. The family, particularly in its child-rearing aspects, is an environment where the social/public value of one's own gestures is adaptive, and where Mead's Loop could have been naturally selected (no doubt Mead's Loop was adaptive in other contexts as well). Archeologists date the dawn of family life (with cooking hearths) to about one million years ago, implying a stable family membership and a division of labor. So it was possibly back then that the natural selection of Mead's Loop also began.
The focus of this selection pressure was adults, women in particular. In this scenario language began in adults, in the form of mothers instructing infants. Their infants, both female and male, would benefit from superior cultural inculcation, and so become more able to carry on any genetic disposition for Mead's Loop themselves.
Did Neaderthals speak? The Neanderthal genome project has shown that this extinct form of human also had FOXP2, and also may have been capable of fine motor control. Whether this control covered the vocal tract is unknown but speech seems not impossible. Some have suggested that the Neanderthal brain, although large, had a different developmental time course from that of human children (much briefer) and did not sustain robust activity of the prefrontal cortex. A short ontogenesis meant less time for any GP-like development. The prefrontal cortex, among its other functions, arranges and selects alternatives. The formation of the contexts that GPs differentiate is a place in language where this ability is tapped. Weakened contexts would have yielded cognitive inflexibility and gesture–speech redundancy rather than unity. Any GP-like dynamics is thus also likely to have been muted.
Even if Neanderthals could speak, their speech is likely to have been temporally sequenced, and limited to what Derek Bickerton posited as proto-language and what Martin Braine called pivot grammars, each pivot a separate "grammar" unto itself. A collection of disparate pivot grammars, lacking an overall system, may have been their highest achievement. Possible gestures would be gesture-first-like pantomimes and pointing (available to today's sub-two-year-olds). Kindly opinion is that our ancestors had nothing directly to do with the Neanderthal extinction but we may have out-competed them. A cultural superiority over cognitive inflexibility and a limited, single semiotic (a profile not unlike Downs syndrome) could have been fatal, if unintended.
Adult–Infant inculcation
Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. 2009. Mothers and others: The evolutionary origins of mutual understanding. Harvard.
Tomasello, Michael. 1999. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Harvard.
Brain model
McNeill, David, & Pedelty, Laura. 1995. Right brain and gesture. In K. Emmorey & J. Reilly (eds.), Sign, Gesture, and Space, pp. 63-85. Erlbaum.
Nishitani, Nobuyuki, Schürmann, Martin, Amunts, Katrin and Hari, Riitta. 2005. 'Broca's region: from action to language.' Physiology 20: 60-69.
Where language began
Atkinson, Quentin D. 2011. 'Phonemic diversity supports a serial founder effect model of language expansion from Africa.' Science 332: 346-349.
Mead's Loop "twist"
Cohen, Akiba A. 1977. 'The communicative function of hand illustrators.' Journal of Communication 27: 54-63.
McNeill, David., Duncan, Susan. D., Cole, Jonathan., Gallagher, Shaun. and Bertenthal, Bennett. 2008. 'Growth points from the very beginning.' Interaction Studies (special issue on proto-language, D. Bickerton and M. Arbib, eds.) 9: 117-132.
Mead, George Herbert. 1974. Mind, self, and society from the standpoint of a social behaviorist (C. W. Morris ed. and introduction). Chicago.
Bickerton, Derek. 1990. Language and Species. Chicago.
Braine, Martin D. S. 1963. 'The ontogeny of English phrase structure: the first phase.' Language 39: s1-13.
Pääbo, S. and colleagues. 2009. News focus in Science 323: 866-871.
Rozzi, Fernando V. Ramirez and de Castro, José Maria Bermudez. 2004. 'Surprisingly rapid growth in Neanderthals.' Nature 428: 936-939.
Wynn, Thomas & Coolidge, Frederick. 2011. How to Think Like a Neandertal. Oxford.
Speech as action control
MacAndrew, Alec. 'FOXP2 and the evolution of language.' http://www.evolutionpages.com/FOXP2_language.htm
"Straight" mirror neurons
Rizzolatti, Giacomo and Arbib, Michael. 1998. 'Language within our grasp.' Trends in Neurosciences 21: 188-194.
Wikipedia article on the Mirror Neuron.
Syntax and shareability
Freyd, Jennifer J. 1983. 'Shareability: The social psychology of epistemology.' Cognitive Science 7: 191-210.
Lenneberg, Eric. 1967. Biological Foundation of Language. Wiley.
McNeill, David and Sowa, Claudia. 2011. 'Birth of a morph.' In G. Stam and M. Ishino (eds.), Integrating Gestures: The Interdisciplinary Nature of Gesture, pp. 27-47. Benjamins.
Sapir, Edward 1921. Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. Harcourt, Brace & World.
Thomason, Sarah. 2011. 'Does language contact simplify grammars? (No).' Talk given at the University of Chicago, April 12.
His new title How Language Began: Gesture and Speech in Human Evolution is now available from Cambridge University Press
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By admin, on October 22nd, 2012%
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A Layman's Guide to "Roots of English"
By admin, on October 16th, 2012%
by Professor Sali A. Tagliamonte
Have you ever wondered about the weird ways of speaking of someone you know? In 1995, I moved to England from Canada, taking up a position at the University of York in Yorkshire. My colleagues came from all over Britain, the south, the north, Scotland and Northern Ireland as well as other parts of Europe. The topic of dialect differences was in the air all the time as we compared our varieties of English. Surprisingly, despite the obvious phonological differences in my speech compared to all my colleagues, there were unexpected correspondences between myself and my Scots, Northern Irish and Northern English colleagues. In some cases, we had the same vowel merger or we had the same lexical item or some odd bit of syntax was similar or we used the same form of one adverb or another. The correspondences came from all levels of grammar and sometimes in unexpected ways. It was curious to me that there were so many similarities and I wondered, why? I discovered that northern varieties of British English were among the most prominent dialect regions from which people migrated to other parts of the world in the late 18th century, particularly my own country of origin, Canada. Could it be that the roots of my way of speaking could be tracked back to these founding dialects? In 1999, embarked upon a research project to study the varieties of English these dialect regions.
Linguistic Wooly Mammoths. The research traditions of dialectology, historical linguistics and sociolinguistics have demonstrated that researchers can gain access earlier points in time. In the absence of a time machine, how is this possible? Consider a woolly mammoth frozen in a glacier. We can gain remarkable insight into past time by studying its characteristics. Linguists employ a similar method.
Places that are geographically remote, socially isolated or set apart from the rest are slow to adopt new changes, or are missed entirely. Such areas are referred to as tend to preserve older features. In this way remote, inaccessible, or otherwise isolated locations provide prime evidence about an earlier stage (or ancestor) of a language and play a key role in reconstructing earlier stages of a language's development. There is perhaps no place more akin to these descriptions than the British and Northern Irish north country.
Dialects galore! What I refer to as the Roots Archive is a rich compendium of oral histories from dozens of elderly people that I collected between 2001-2003. The materials contain rich language data with a wealth of rarely heard features of the English language. There are innumerable dialect words and expressions, e.g. fuzzok, peery, thrang. There are unusual sounds, och, aye. There are unexpected twists in the arrangement of sentences and in the way sentences begin and end, e.g. and that, you know. There are unusual conversational rituals. There are many things that are unusual and exotic; there are some things that are entirely unknown and yet others are hauntingly familiar. In many cases, features long gone from mainstream varieties of English endure. In order to give readers a profound sense of the dialects, I have sprinkled the chapters with quips, stories and interchanges from the conversations e.g. weans and it's a good job, as in:
Weans
Aye, they just come on the phone- "Morag could you come out the night there's somebody, ken. Such and such a body can nae manage yin". "Aye, Aye, I'll just come out aye". She's just leaving the dogs. Says I, it's a good job it's no weans you've got for you would nae- could nae go!
These quotes expose innumerable dialect features. I have made note of some of them in footnotes so that readers can try to spot the features themselves and then verify whether they have found them all. Here is the footnote to the 'weans' quote.
Note the use of aye as a discourse marker; ken as a discourse particle; somebody rather than someone followed by use of a body in the generic; yin for 'one'; inverted, says; the expression it's a good job; the syntactic structure it's no weans you've got 'you've got no children'; use of can nae, would nae for 'wouldn't', 'couldn't'.
Many of the features I discuss in the book are well known across English vernaculars, including regularized pasts, e.g. knowed, come, past tense seen and done among others. Others are typical of the northern UK dialects and often reported in compendia of varieties of English. However, a few have rarely been reported.
Linguistic detectives. Each chapter of Roots of English offers readers a "Dialect Puzzle" so that they can get a taste of what it is like to be a sociolinguist.
Dialects are the storehouse of the heart and soul of culture, history and identity. For analysts of language, dialects are a tremendous resource for understanding the grammatical mechanisms of linguistic change. Delving deep into the nuts and bolts of language, deeper than words and phrases and expressions, down into the grammar, we discover a treasure trove. Beneath the anecdotes and nonce tales are hidden patterns and constraints that are a system unto themselves reflecting the legacy of regional factions, social groups and human relationships. As language evolves through history its inner mechanisms are evolving incrementally, but not in the same way in every place nor at the same rate in all circumstances. One of my goals is to leave the reader with new ideas about the roots of his or her own dialect and how its particular socio-geographic co-ordinates might offer a 'goldmine' for ongoing study.
Sali A. Tagliamonte is a professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto. Her new title, Roots of English is now available from Cambridge University Press.
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By admin, on October 8th, 2012%
Part 1: Language and Imagery
Why do we gesture? Many would say that it brings emphasis, energy, and ornamentation to speech (which is assumed to be the core of what is taking place); in short, as Adam Kendon says, also arguing against the view, gesture is an "add-on." However, the evidence is against this. The reasons we gesture are more profound. Language is inseparable from imagery. The natural form of imagery with language is gesture, with the hands especially. While gestures can enhance communication, the core is gesture and speech together. They are bound more tightly than saying the gesture is an "add-on" or "ornament" implies. Even if for some reason a gesture is not made (social inappropriateness, physical difficulty, etc.), its imagery is still present, hidden but part of the speech process (it may surface in some other part of the body, the feet for example).
To answer to the question, why we gesture?, it is because gesture was built in from the start. Language could not have evolved without it. If a theory of language origin is to predict the nature of language, it must among other things predict this gesture-speech unity. But if a theory says that gesture-speech unity did not evolve, and/or predicts that something incompatible with it did evolve, the theory cannot be correct. A widespread theory that I will call "gesture-first" fails this test. In this first post I explain gesture–speech unity. In later posts I apply the test and propose a new theory, called "Mead'sLoop," that meets it.
The smallest unit of gesture–speech unity is called a growth point, or GP. Growth points are inferred from the totality of communicative events, with special focus on speech–gesture synchrony and co-expressivity. They are called growth points because they are meant to be the initial pulses of thinking-for-and-while-speaking, a dialectic (or "multilectic") from which a dynamic process of organization emerges. The result is what Wundt described as the two modes of consciousness in speech:
"From a psychological point of view, the sentence is both a simultaneous and a sequential structure. It is simultaneous because at each moment it is present in consciousness as a totality even though the individual subordinate elements may occasionally disappear from it. It is sequential because the configuration changes from moment to moment in its cognitive condition as individual constituents move into the focus of attention and out again one after another." (Blumenthal 1970 translation of Wundt 1900, p. 21).
In a GP dialectic Wundt's two modes are a natural outcome. The "simultaneous" is consciousness of the GP and dialectic itself; the "sequential" is awareness of what I call unpacking. The model is that a GP differentiates what for the speaker is the point of newsworthiness in the immediate context of speaking. This differentiation, partly linguistic form, partly imagery, is then "unpacked" into a construction, both rendering it communicable as a social effort and putting a stop-order to the dialectic. (It's the nature of this post that I must introduce a number of new terms, several of them binary opposites; I've placed a diagram at the end that lists them and shows how they relate.)
The figure below is an example of the kind of gesture we focus on (sometimes called "gesticulation"), illustrating the two simultaneous modes (the gestures were spontaneous occurrences, recorded during an experiment in which speakers were retelling an animated Tweety and Sylvester cartoon they had just watched; in this episode, Sylvester (an ever-seeking cat) attempts to reach Tweety (a pugnacious canary), who is perched on a windowsill several stories above the street, in a stealth approach by climbing a drainpipe on the inside). The gestures are iconic signs but the iconicity is semantic, not photo-like. They are images of concepts of the events in the story:
Pointing upward, she says, "he tries to go up inside," localizing the character in gesture space.
Then, making a spiraling upward movement, she says, "barreling up through it," depicting the character's presumed spinning inside the pipe – an inference (not shown in the film).
Her left hand is shaped as a cup and embodies her concept of the inside of the drainpipe, timed exactly to go with the "barreling" part of her description.
It is important to note that gesture and speech cover the same idea units. It is not that gesture holds hidden messages. Statements that such and such a percentage of meaning is "non-verbal" fly against the reality of gesture-speech unity. In nearly every case, speech and gesture convey the same meaning, but they do it in opposite ways. We see in the gesture visuospatial thinking – not only about space as such but about the same content also expressed verbally. Note the use of the left hand for inside the pipe. It is her concept of interiority, not a depiction of the actual pipe, which enclosed Sylvester and was vertical, not horizontal. Both the verbal and imagistic modes capture interiority but in opposite ways. Unlike the sentence, the 'parts' of the gesture (the shape, the direction, the motion, etc.) do not have their own meanings; they are meaningful only in the context of the gesture as a whole. This is called the global property: the meanings of the parts depend on the meaning of the whole. It is the opposite in speech. There the parts (words) have their own meanings and build up the meaning of the whole through combination. This is called the syntagmatic property.
So in gesture-speech unity different modes of semiosis ("semiosis" and "semiotic" refer to the nature of symbols) are presenting the same meanings at the same time – global whole-to-part in gesture, syntagmatic part-to-whole in speech, and they are synchronous. Throughness is visualized as a hollow space – not an iconic replica of the pipe but the concept realized imagistically with its own location. It goes not with 'inside' but with its conceptually parallel 'barreling up through.' When gesture and speech synchronize (as they do in that vast majority of utterances), one idea – here, Sylvester's ascent via the pipe – is simultaneously in two semiotic modes, imagery and language. The result is an idea unit in which imagery and words combine, and this is an inherently dynamic situation. Such a system of language, an imagery-language dialectic, would be explained if we found, independently, that language began in a gesture-speech unity. We shall later see how this may have happened (post 3).
Seeing the gesture and the co-expressive speech it synchronizes with, we witness a moment of an ongoing imagery–language dialectic. Gesture-speech unity is the nexus at which imagery and the codified forms of language form intersect – two dimensions of language with equal weight. The picture is not unlike Humboldt's distinction of Ergon and Energeia (language viewed as structure and language as an "embodied moment of meaning located both in the organism and in the medium that the organism uses for expression." The latter is language at the moment of its use, "alive, in an actor": Joseph Glick describing seminars by Heinz Werner; from Elena Levy).
The larger picture – 1. Historically, the dynamic and static have been approached separately – each with its own traditions, methodologies, sciences, and institutional practices (& prejudices). Each tradition describes something of substance:
Static = language is a thing, not a process. This is the Saussurian tradition and it bears on Wundt's sequential mode. The academic field of linguistics has specialized on the static dimension.
Dynamic = language is a process, not a thing. This is the Vygotsky tradition and it bears on Wundt's simultaneous mode. The budding field of gesture studies focuses on this dimension.
However, we must combine them. The dynamic does not replace the static. Gesture gives us access to the dynamic mode. Linguistic form gives the static (no particular synchronic description is favored: we go with whatever fits best the dynamic picture we are trying to paint). The important point is that both modes are present.
The larger picture – 2. An imagery–language dialectic implies:
A conflict or opposition of some kind, in our case between the two semiotic modes, a dual semiosis.
Resolution of the conflict through change, its unpacking.
A dialectic is inherently dynamic and a good model of the psycholinguistics of speaking.
A dialectic presupposes Vygotsky's concept of a unit as the smallest component that retains the quality of a whole. This whole is the imagery–language dialectic. A GP of unified gesture and speech is the smallest unit in which an imagery-language dialectic takes place. Further reduction to a gesture and a linguistic segment separately destroys the unit itself, leaving only a gesture or linguistic segment but not a dynamic process.
A quick list of GP's properties:
It is proposed as the minimal unit of the imagery-language dialectic.
It is a dialectic package that has both linguistic categorial and imagistic components.
Growth points are inferred from the totality of communicative events with special focus on speech-gesture synchrony and co-expressivity.
By focusing on these properties we bring out the modes of cognition envisioned by Wundt.
All of this is why we gesture. Gesture is an integral part of speaking. And language could not have begun without it. The next post in this series will take up the evolutionary precursors of this dual semiotic system of gesture-speech unity.
The many binaries. I have made the following diagram to sort out the several distinct but related binary oppositions, plus a few other critical terms in this posting. The numbers are the order in which the first mention of the term occurred:
Kendon, Adam. 2008. 'Some reflections on the relationship between 'gesture' and 'sign.'' Gesture 8:348-366.
McNeill, D. and Duncan, S. D. 2000. Growth points in thinking for speaking. In D. McNeill (ed.), Gesture and Language, pp. 141-161. Cambridge University Press.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1959. Course in General Linguistics (Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, eds., Wade Baskin, trans.). New York: The Philosophical Library.
Vygotsky, Lev S. 1987. Thought and Language. Edited and translated by E. Hanfmann and G. Vakar (revised and edited by A. Kozulin). MIT Press.
Wundt, Wilhelm. 1970. 'The psychology of the sentence.' In A. Blumenthal (ed. and trans.). Language and Psychology: Historical Aspects of Psycholinguistics, pp. 20-33. Wiley.
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Duels and Duets: Why Men and Women Talk So Differently
By admin, on August 23rd, 2011%
A blog post by John L. Locke
It has long been known that men and women talk differently when conversing with members of the opposite sex. This has never been explained, but insights emerge from same-sex conversations where, free of the need to accommodate to each other, deeper differences between men and women readily bob to the surface.
In Duels and Duets, I claim that modern men and women talk differently because our male and female ancestors followed different evolutionary paths. Since men were selected to aggress and dominate, but could end up killing themselves, they needed a safer way of achieving their goals. Ritualized duels, using words instead of weapons, filled the bill. Verbal duels also provided a way for me to display the fitness information that women needed in making their long-term mating choices.
In a number of traditional societies, anthropologists have encountered various contests, from song duels to drum duels, poetic duels, and sung poetic duels – all fought with words, and all fought by men. By itself, this is intriguing, but the underlying disposition to duel also leeches into the speech of men in modern societies, even when they are merely socializing with their colleagues and friends. In these ordinary duels, men denigrate their friends in a humorous way, often before an audience, but they also hold competitive joke- and story-telling sessions that feature verbal artistry.
Today, many men see themselves as performers, seeking eloquence where it could attract favorable attention from women and men, and portraying themselves as heroes in the stories they tell. One trial lawyer, so theatrical in the courtroom that someone said he should have been an actor, responded, "What do you mean 'should have been'?"
For reasons I describe in the book, women have tended to compete with other women indirectly, through mutual friends, and they have enlisted a more harmonious way of talking to build their relationships. In these duets, women create feelings of closeness through intimate disclosures about others and themselves. Gossip, the name we give to conversations that impart information about others, derives from "god-sibs" – originally "God's siblings" – the 15th and 16th century women who gathered in bedrooms to witness new births but, while awaiting the natal event, discussed matters of mutual interest. An unusually pure form of duetting occurs when women collaborate, effectively co-authoring and co-telling their personal stories.
Some books on "gendered language" say that little boys learn to talk like their father, and little girls imitate their mother. But it is clear that males and females come into the world pre-wired to engage with other members of their sex in vastly different ways. The endocrine system plays an important role here, supporting various relationships between the speaking voice and reproduction. Men who enjoy locking verbal horns in public also tend to have more testosterone than others – trial lawyers are off the charts.
The adaptive value of this is revealed, predictably, on the evaluative side of the equation: women prefer men with low-pitched voices, especially during the high fertility phase of their menstrual cycle. In this sense, women literally call the tune. But other areas of speech and language are also involved in courtship, and I discuss the things that men do, in their speaking behaviors, to convince women that they have the right biological stuff. Of course, duetting has its own set of physiological supports. Intimate vocalization tends to increase oxytocin, which appears to facilitate emotional connection, and to decrease cortisol, a stress hormone.
How discrete are the relationships between the human sexes and their preferred ways of talking? I've found lots of cases, historically, where women verbally assaulted each other, but these assaults were typically genuine – lodged in anger, usually as a form of reprisal for a perceived injustice – not as a way of posturing or relating, and none was ritualized. Women may denigrate themselves, but they do not insult their close women friends, even humorously. Men do talk quietly and privately with other men, but they usually shy away from the intimate self-disclosures that could increase their vulnerability, and they rarely work through other men in their efforts to compete with male rivals. If they have something to say to a foe or competitor, they usually go up to him and say it.
Toward the end of the book, I revisit linguistic evolution, suggesting that if human language is built the way it is because the designers, the ancient human architects, were built the way that they were, then the shape of language would have been formed around these innately scripted preferences and priorities. But how did this happen? How did the human sexes' ways of relating and interacting affect the design of spoken language? In earlier chapters I focus on the things that language, as a communicative tool, has done for men and women; in the final chapter I ask what men and women did for language.
In recent years, writers have discussed the fact that speaking differences can cause couples to clash in their conversations. But couples also need to collaborate in carrying out a broad range of domestic operations, from getting the car fixed to raising the children, paying the bills, and maintaining some sort of social schedule. Teams usually work better if the members bring different strengths to the table, and divide up the responsibilities. Different speaking strategies, I suggest, can and do help men and women to mesh in their lives.
John L. Locke is the author of Duels and Duets: Why Men and Women Talk So Differently. Click here to find out more about the book and order your copy today for just £14.99 / $28.00
Why not listen to Professor Locke in discussion with Kirsten Hoge on Woman's Hour
Leave a comment Discourse Analysis, Sociolinguistics, The Evolution of Language duels and duets, evolution of language, gender, John L. Locke, john locke, sociolinguistics, speaking differences


text:
Saudi Authorities Should Release Salma al-Shehab, Longest Prison Sentence Ever for Peaceful Activism
in Advocacy, DAWN, Saudi Arabia
The international community should put pressure on Saudi authorities for Salma al-Shehab's unconditional release, quash her conviction, and release all others currently detained in the kingdom for peaceful exercise of fundamental rights, groups say in letter.
On 9 August, the Saudi Specialised Criminal Court of Appeal charged women's rights activist, Salma al-Shehab, with the longest prison sentence ever for a peaceful campaigner, totaling 34 years without suspension to be followed by a travel ban of the same length. DAWN joins groups urging the international community to put pressure on Saudi authorities for Salma al-Shehab's release, her conviction quashed, as well as release all others currently detained in the kingdom for the peaceful exercise of their fundamental rights.
We, the undersigned NGOs, call on the international community to press Saudi Arabian authorities to immediately and unconditionally release women's rights activist and academic Salma al-Shehab, who was recently sentenced to 34 years in prison based on tweets in support of women's rights and for the respect of basic rights. It is the longest known prison sentence handed down against a peaceful activist for their free speech in Saudi Arabia, signalling an alarming deterioration of the human rights situation in the country.
Al-Shehab, a 34-year-old mother of two children, is a dental hygienist and PhD student at Leeds University in the United Kingdom, where she was residing before her detention. She was arrested on 15 January 2021 while on holiday in Saudi Arabia, and subjected to solitary confinement and lengthy sessions of questioning over a period of nine and a half months before being brought before the Specialised Criminal Court (SCC), a court used as an instrument of repression to silence dissent in the kingdom. Al-Shehab belongs to the country's Shi'a Muslim minority, who have long suffered from the government's repression.
On 9 August 2022, the Specialised Criminal Court of Appeal sentenced al-Shehab to 34 years in prison after a grossly unfair trial, to be followed by a travel ban of the same length. The charges against her included "supporting those who seek to disrupt the public order"" and publishing tweets "that disrupt the public order", in connection with posts on her account where she expressed support for prisoners of conscience such as women's rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul. The sentence also includes closure of her Twitter account and deactivation of her phone number.
Al-Shehab was sentenced under the kingdom's draconian Counter-Terrorism and Anti-Cyber Crime Laws, which include vaguely formulated provisions that criminalise the rights to freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly in Saudi Arabia. She was initially handed down a six-year sentence in March 2022, 14 months after being detained, but her sentence was increased during the appeal process, resulting in the longest known prison sentence against a peaceful activist in the kingdom. This ruling is subject to appeal in the Supreme Court.
We strongly condemn the arbitrary arrest and unlawful sentencing of al-Shehab, which marks a further escalation in the crackdown on free speech in Saudi Arabia. In contrast to the authorities' rhetoric on human rights, including women's rights and legal reforms, the real drivers of reform – the activists calling for basic rights – continue to be ruthlessly targeted and silenced, with repressive laws being used to criminalise their peaceful expression and activism.
Al-Shehab's unjust sentence follows the recent visit of US President Joe Biden to Saudi Arabia, as well as French President Emmanuel Macron's hosting of Saudi Crown Prince and de-facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman in Paris. Such high-level meetings, without firm preconditions being set, have only emboldened the kingdom's leadership to commit further abuses, as many of us warned before Biden's trip.
As global calls to hold Saudi Arabia's leaders accountable – notably over the state-sponsored murder of Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 – have become more muted, the authorities have reverted to their habitual pattern of repression, an ongoing feature of the crown prince's rule since 2017. It includes the arbitrary arrest and detentionof people peacefully exercising their fundamental rights; lengthy prison sentences for peaceful critics after grossly unfair trials; arbitrary use of travel bans against activists once released from prison; deliberate medical and administrative neglect leading to deaths in detention and the inhumane conditions of detention centres holding migrant workers and their families.
Meanwhile the Saudi authorities have carried out 120 executions so far this year – more than double the number for the whole of 2021 – including the execution of 81 men on 12 March 2022, its largest mass execution in recent decades.
Only sustained international pressure on the Saudi authorities will lead to meaningful progress towards full respect for human rights and freedoms in the country. We therefore call on the international community, especially states with diplomatic leverage such as the United States and the United Kingdom, to press the Saudi authorities to immediately and unconditionally release Salma al-Shehab and quash her conviction, as well as release all others currently detained in the kingdom for the peaceful exercise of their fundamental rights.
ACAT-France
ALQST for Human Rights
Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB)
Danish PEN
English PEN
European Centre for Democracy and Human Rights (ECDHR)
European Saudi Organisation for Human Rights (ESOHR)
FEMENA
The Freedom Initiative
Freedom Now
Gulf Centre for Human Rights (GCHR)
Human Rights Foundation (HRF)
Human Rights Sentinel
IFEX
The International Campaign for Freedom in the United Arab Emirates (ICFUAE)
International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), within the framework of the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders
Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED)
Red Line for Gulf (RL4G)
SMEX (Social Media Exchange)
Vigilance for Democracy and the Civic State
World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT), within the framework of the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders
This image was sourced from VOI News: https://voi.id/en/technology/202205/salma-al-shehab-first-woman-convicted-by-saudi-arabian-government-for-her-tweet
Source: VOI.ID News
Tags: activistSalma al-ShehabSaudi Arabiawomen rights
Michele Alexander, Leader in Human Rights and Organizational Strategy, Joins DAWN Board of Directors
Saudi Arabia: Government Sentences Woman to 45 Years for Her Tweets