quesadilla
(kā'sə-dē'yə)
n.
A flour tortilla folded in half around a savory filling, as of cheese or beans, then fried or toasted.
[American Spanish, from Spanish, diminutive of quesada, type of cheesecake, from queso, cheese, from Old Spanish, from Latin cāseus.]
The turnip or white turnip (Brassica rapa subsp. rapa) is a root vegetable commonly grown in temperate climates worldwide for its white, bulbous taproot. Small, tender varieties are grown for human consumption, while larger varieties are grown as feed for livestock.[citation needed]
In the north of England and Scotland, the name turnip, shortened to "neeps", often refers to the larger, yellow rutabaga root vegetable which is also known as the "swede" (from "Swedish turnip").[1]
turnip roots最近一位女性友人告訴我，她女兒情緒低落。這女孩念大一第二學期，跟一個男生上過床，而眾所周知的是，那男生還跟另外幾個女孩上過床。他是要試用過她們之後再決定跟誰「交往」。
那女孩感到氣惱，但惱的主要不是評選方式（她有點意識到它的不公平性），而是氣惱自己不是最後的當選者。
這讓我覺得自己是個太古時代的倖存者，有幸不用參與一個仍用雕花蕪菁當貨幣的文化。回到「我的年代」（這麼說當然不表示我擁有它），一般所謂的 「交往」都是這個意思：如果妳認識了某個女孩，又被她吸引，你會先邀她參加兩、三次群體活動（例如好幾個人一起到小酒館喝酒），然後才會單獨約她外出。然 後，經過一連串熾熱程度不同的晚安吻別後，你便多少能說已正式與她進入「交往」階段。也只有獲得這種半公開的承認後，你會得知她的性尺度，而這有時表示， 她會把自己的身體保衛得像是禁漁區。
Words Cannot Express
By DEREK BICKERTON
Published: September 3, 2010
Is language first and foremost an artifact of culture? Or is it largely determined by human biology? This issue has been argued back and forth for a couple of centuries with no clear resolution in sight. Guy Deutscher’s 2005 book “The Unfolding of Language” placed him firmly in the pro-culture camp. Now, in his new book, “Through the Language Glass,” he examines some idiosyncratic aspects of particular languages that, in his opinion, cast further doubt on biologically based theories of language.
Illustration by Serge Bloch
THROUGH THE LANGUAGE GLASS
Why The World Looks Different in Other Languages
By Guy Deutscher
304 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. $28
Related
Times Topic: Grammar and Usage
Deutscher does not merely weave little-known facts into an absorbing story. He also takes account of the vast changes in our perceptions of other races and cultures over the past two centuries. Although the strange sequence in which color terms appear in the world’s languages over time — first black and white, then red, then either green or yellow, with blue appearing only after the first five are in place — still has no full explanation, Deutscher’s suggestion that the development of dyes and other forms of artificial coloring may be involved is as convincing as any other, making color terms the likeliest candidate for a culture-induced linguistic phenomenon.
But then Deutscher switches to another issue entirely, that of linguistic complexity. He brings off a superb “emperor has no clothes” moment by demonstrating that the “fact” (attested in countless linguistic texts) that all languages are equally complex has no empirical basis whatsoever. Moreover, as he points out, such a claim could not be made even in principle, since there are no objective, nonarbitrary criteria for measuring linguistic complexity across entire languages.
Deutscher then goes on to addresses the relationship between language and thought. Do speakers of all languages think in similar ways, or do different languages give their speakers quite different pictures of the world (a view sometimes referred to as “linguistic relativity”)? Deutscher rejects linguistic relativity in its strong form, pouring scorn on its most vehement defender, the early-20th-century linguist Benjamin Whorf, and again firmly locating his account in the cultural-historical background. His skepticism extends even to promising cases like that of the Amazonian language Matses, whose arsenal of verb forms obliges you not only to explicitly indicate the kind of evidence — personal experience, inference, conjecture or hearsay — on which every statement you make is based, but also to distinguish recent inferences from older ones and say whether the interval between inference and event was long or short. If you choose the wrong verb form, you are treated as a liar. But the distinctions that must be expressed by verbal inflections in Matses, Deutscher argues, can all be easily understood by English speakers and easily expressed in English by means of circumlocutions.
Deutscher does find three areas where a weaker version of linguistic relativity might hold — color terms, spatial relations and grammatical gender. Ever since Mark Twain mocked the pronoun confusions of “the awful German language” — a young girl is an “it” while a turnip is a “she” — most people, including linguists, have treated gender assignment as largely arbitrary and idiosyncratic, devoid of any cognitive content. But recent experiments have shown that speakers do indeed, on a subconscious level, form associations between nonliving (“neuter”) objects and masculine or feminine properties. As for spatial relationships, we English speakers relate the positions of objects or other people to ourselves (“in front of,” “behind,” “beside”) or to each other, but some languages use compass references (“east of,” “southwest of”) for identical relationships. Deutscher argues that repeated use of such expressions forces speakers of these languages to develop an internal cognitive compass, so that regardless of where they are and what they are facing, they automatically register the location of the cardinal points.
Deutscher presents his material in a chatty and accessible (if sometimes verbose) style, and if he had left things at that, he would have written just the kind of language book most readers love — heavy on quirky detail, light on technicalities and theory. But he also burdens his findings with more theoretical weight than they can bear.
First, the facets of language he deals with do not involve “fundamental aspects of our thought,” as he claims, but relatively minor ones. Things like location, color and grammatical gender hardly condition our thinking even in the day-to-day management of our lives, let alone when we address issues of politics, science or philosophy. Moreover, with the possible exception of color terms, cultural factors seldom correlate with linguistic phenomena, and even when they seem to, the correlation is not causal. For instance, languages of small tribes tend to have words with multiple inflections, while those of complex industrial or postindustrial societies do not. However, this phenomenon is not directly caused by differing degrees of social complexity. Rather, complex societies tend to have much larger and more ethnically diverse populations, hence they experience far more interactions between native speakers of different languages and dialects. It is this factor that encourages simplification and erodes word endings.
Take a hypothetical correlation that really might have cultural causes. Suppose relative clauses appeared only when a society entered the market economy. Any such finding would revolutionize our understanding of the interface between language and culture. But not only has no such relationship ever been demonstrated, nothing remotely like it has ever been found.
Explaining why he rejects biologically based explanations of language, Deutscher states that “if the rules of grammar are meant to be coded in the genes, then one could expect the grammar of all languages to be the same, and it is then difficult to explain why grammars should ever vary in any fundamental aspects.” Actually, it’s quite easy. Simply suppose that biology provides not a complete grammar, but rather the building blocks out of which such a grammar can be made. That is, in fact, all biology could be expected to do. With physical organs, biology can mandate — two legs instead of four, five fingers instead of six. But when it comes to behavior, biology cannot mandate. It can only facilitate, offering a range of possibilities from which culture (or more likely, sheer chance) can choose.
Fortunately, relatively little of “Through the Language Glass” is devoted to these issues. Readers can ignore Deutscher’s broader claims, and enjoy the little-trodden linguistic bypaths along which he so knowledgeably leads them.
Derek Bickerton is an emeritus professor of linguistics at the University of Hawaii. His most recent book is “Adam’s Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans.”
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A root vegetable of European origin, the turnip belongs to a family that also includes cabbage, mustard and radish. The fleshy part of the turnip is covered with a thin skin, the upper part of which forms a reddish or purple ring. The tops of the turnip plant are edible. Turnip is often confused with rutabaga. It can be told apart by its leaves, which are rough and hairy.
turnip
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