Ian Levy

"I think I found the articles to be even less effective and especially regarding the biological status of language. I perceive it as a cultural artform and something that cannot be reduced to pure brain function. I am usually deeply skeptical of…"

"I also encountered a similar argument for Turkish concerning its language family. I was not aware of the controversy between the Altaic and Koreanic classification for Korean. I also noticed some loanwords in Turkish, which are Arabic and Persian…"

"I generally agree here, but I think I dislike the practice of operationalizing cultures and ascribing variables to them. I think a full culture is far too dynamic and fluid to ever accurately denote with categories or values, and especially as a…"

If I were to receive a research grant, the first thing I would do is find a connection to Russian culture itself. While doing online research is great, I would want to be physically in the culture I am researching. In turn, I would apply for the appropriate travel visa and research what area(s) of Russia are safest for me to live. Next, I would allocate my grant budget to my desired research topic. If researching Russian culture and language, I would center my research around how the political and geographical atmosphere affect or influence speech patterns. In other words, I would like to research how perhaps the colder climate intersects with the Russian cultural norm of being “colder”– less flagrantly positive, more blunt, etc. I would also like to study how Russia’s authoritarian rule affects Russian culture, and consequently, the Russian language. Specifically, I am interested in looking at if historical lack of privacy in Russia– mostly a result/factor of communism– has led to…

So far this month, my Language Learning Partner, Kimmi Kraus, and I have continued to deepen my understanding of ASL by exploring several different linguistic as well as cultural concepts. These concepts included classifiers, noun-verb pairs, temporal inflection, Deaf Clubs and, once again, the expansion of my vocabulary. The most interesting of all these concepts however, was undoubtedly classifiers. Classifiers in ASL are specific handshapes used to represent categories of objects, people, or movements. They are highly visual and allow signers to convey detailed information about size, shape, location, and motion in a very efficient way. At first, classifiers felt challenging because they require both creativity and spatial awareness, but with practice, I began to understand how they function within storytelling and everyday communication. I worked on using classifiers to describe objects moving through space, such as vehicles, people walking, and even people “tossing and turning”…

Ian Levy

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