Wörter und Sachen

Annoying Orange

Wörter und Sachen means "Words and Things" in German. It refers to a movement in Germany/Austria, in the early 20^th century, that insisted we use the etymology of words to study the cultural products named by those words.

It’s also a 1959 book by Ernst Gellner* titled Words and Things: An Examination Of, and an Attack On, Linguistic Philosophy.

The study of the language of smells requires a most astute clarification of the words from the things, which is made most difficult by the fact that smells are the things their words describe. The smell of an orange is an orange. The color of an orange is not. The color of anything is instead white light being reflected off of a surface, the color being the portion of that white spectrum not absorbed into the surface. So the color of a thing is almost like the opposite of the thing.

*Gellner is a personal favorite of mine; I have many posts on my other blog inspired by him or in reference to another work of his, Plough, Sword and Book (1988).

Semantic Atlas Shrugs

credits: University of California Berkeley 

Research at the University of California Berkeley has consecrated a semantic atlas of the brain, and reorganized our understanding of the entire semantic system in the process.

It was previously thought that word-memory was concentrated into certain semantic groups throughout the brain. Now we know that they’re scattered everywhere. Not only that, the pattern of distribution is quite similar from person to person.

In the study, volunteers listened to a radio program while active regions of their brain (showing more blood flow) left their mark on a timestamped map. Scientists later matched the words of the radio show to the brain’s activity map to create this “semantic atlas”.

Although the semantic atlas is now known to spread across the whole cerebral cortex, the researchers revealed groupings into the following areas: mental, emotional, social, communal, professional, violent, temporal, abstract, locational, numeric, tactile, and visual.

The same word can show up many times in the atlas. Words with abstract meanings and words related to the body populate many regions of the atlas.

Taken from the BBC article:

“For example, the word "top" was represented in a part of the brain that responds to words about clothing and appearance, and also in a region that deals with numbers and measurements.”

Brain's 'atlas' of words revealed - BBC News - April 2016

see a more detailed map of the semantic atlas here at Nature:

Semantic atlas for the opercular and insular cortex