What are you do this day?

Test going on beside me.

“What are you do this day?”
“Ungh… eodeoggae?” ((((((((Uh… how can I….?))))))))
“I’m to go…”
“I’m go to fitness club.”
“Oh! That sound is great! How do you like it?”
“It’s great.”
“.”
“.”
“Edodeoggae?” ((((((((How the heck….?))))))))
“Eong, edodeoggae?” ((((((((Yeeeeeeeeah… how….?))))))))

Okay, it’s made up but the quality level is about the same. The testers before were a lot better, they had the whole conversation memorized… I’m damn sure if I had a Korean class in high school I’d have been doing better than that in my sophomore college classes. Actually, I was, in French, though yes that was grad school, but despite that and the linguistic connections between French and English, given the long exposure that they supposedly had to English in high school, I still think those two I just transcribed just didn’t study hard enough.

Wow! We DO Rock?!?

Not bad for a bunch of ajeoshis.

We placed 3rd in the local K-Rock Festival auditions, meaning our band will advance to the 2nd round, and play a song in Seoul in November, competing for a chance to play in the K-Rock festival in December. For having placed in the audition, I am told, we will get 500,000 won, which is about $600.00 Canadian. Band money exists again! Nice, as we’re talking about the next album already.

And here I was thinking the heavy metal girls in the tight clothes jiggling their tender bits would be a shoe-in for prize money… nope. We actually placed.

The details are still hazy, but it looks like we have three gigs in Jeonju next week. I’ll post here and on the Dabang website when there’s more information available. Right now I don’t know enough to say.

Birds, Language, and Man

We used to think that only primates could understand language, and that to other animals, it was just noises… even to parrots, who can imitate us. But that seems to have been wrong. Over at Edge there’s an article about “THAT DAMN BIRD”, which is an African Grey Parrot whose behaviour has led a researcher to claim he is actually understanding what he’s saying in tests. Which is absolutely fascinating since it challenges a lot of what we thought we knew about language and brains. But it’s also frustrating to some scientists, which is why the title of the article contains the (mild) cuss… this is really worth a look.

It makes me think about other changes that happen in animals when they live in close proximity to humans. I wonder if, despite all the centuries of careful breeding that gave them amazing human-focused social awareness, dogs’ grasp of social interactions doesn’t develop quite as deeply when it lives in the wild… I don’t know, but I wonder.

And it also raises the question that people often ask about feral children, which is, how human can a human actually be when that human has no experience of language or culture during its crucial early development phase?