It has to be mentioned about. Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist whose revolutionary studies of what was once called “primitive man” transformed Western understanding of the nature of culture, custom and civilization, has died at 100. I was writing about his 100th birthday a year back on this blog. Undoubtedly, he was one of the greatest minds of the 20th century!
(news&photo: nyt)
I’ve never heard of this word before. It’s so beautiful! Mamihlapinatapai (sometimes spelled mamihlapinatapei) is a word from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego. It’s listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the “most succinct word” – the word that has the most complex meaning and is considered one of the hardest words to translate. The meaning can be translated as: “a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start.” It’s so human and experienced so often, since both are too scared or nervous to make the first move:)
(photo: independent.co.uk)
On 28th of November in Paris, one of the last icons of 20th century French intellectual life turned 100. Claude Levi-Strauss not only reshaped the nature of how anthropologists do their work: he changed the world’s perception of so-called “primitive” tribes in Asia, Africa and America. His structuralism (Structural anthropology, 1967) revolutionized anthropology and sociology and is still considered a foundation for the social sciences, but it was with his 1955 book “Tristes Tropiques,” a sort of anthropological meditation based on his travels in Brazil and elsewhere in the 1930s, when he became world famous. Undoubtedly, one of the greatest minds of humankind!
Some media coverge:
NYT, 100th-Birthday Tributes Pour in for Lévi-Strauss
Open Democracy, Claude Lévi-Strauss at 100: echo of the future
The independent, Grand chieftain of anthropology lives to see his centenary
Genius physicist Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel Prize Winner for introducing quarks, speaks shortly on TED about the scientific theory of the common ancestor for all the languages. He was previously present there with his amazing lecture on the elegance and beauty of physics: Are elegant equations more likely to be right than inelegant ones?
An announcement: I’m changing the blog title back into the old, good and short elemele. I miss that name. Not that my affection for this nonsense sentenence by Chomsky stopped, but it’s really a little bit too long and complex (for a title) and I can’t get used to it. So, basically everything remains the same, especially the surreal taste of being. Sorry for the mess.
I’ve found really amazing book titled Imaginationally which is actually an illustrated dictionary of neologisms created by Michael Bernard Loggins to describe his everyday thoughts and experiences. I like any kind of wordplay, language-play, watching language development process and I truly love those words, some of them evoke vague feeling of emptiness that they are not present in everyday use (you missed them without knowing that!). Have you ever felt ‘terrifical’? Are you in the habit of ‘uncluding’ things you don’t like? Maybe you live in ‘troublemakerhood’?
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously — a sentence by Noam Chomsky, one of the world’s greatest linguists, was created to show relation (or rather no relation at all) between grammar and the meaning, which makes the language arbitrary. Chomsky had a great influence on my way of thinking and development (esp. during linguistics studies); his scientific attitude has always depicted courage to continuously think out-of-the-box, to contradict, to question, to challenge, and then to start over… Thus, this nonsense sentence has some kind of sentimental value for me, but also fits my current affection for pure nonsense aesthetics (based on deep feeling of reality absurdity and beauty at the same time). We all meet lack of logic and this surreal taste of being everyday, on many levels, in others and in our lives, don’t we?
