hey all,
So the swelling is almost totally gone, and I'm planning on going back to work on Monday. I've been watching a ton of movies. Here is a small sample: Prowl, Limitless, The Company Men, Hot Tub Time Machine, Age of the Dragons, The Eagle, The Illusionist (the French animation, not the live action movie with Edward Norton), Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, etc...Actually, that might be a near exhaustive list. I also finally got caught up on the anime Bleach.
As a linguist trained mostly in the US, I'm a big believer in the language universals theory put forth, for example by Chomsky. However, it appears that some researchers have found evidence that the so called "universals" might just be examples of convergent evolution. That, instead of all languages having certain properties (or, as important, lacking certain properties) because of the wiring of the human brain, languages seem to have the properties they do because of human culture. This is more akin to convergent evolution, like birds, insects and bat all being able to fly, even though birds, insects and bats are not very closely related to each other.
Cheers,
