Word: linguistic
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...done more to stir doubts than Columbia University Psychologist Herbert Terrace in his work with little Nim (full name: Nim Chimpsky, a play on the name of Linguist Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a staunch proponent of the idea that language ability is biologically unique to humans). The object of Terrace's experiment was to prove Chomsky wrong -to show that creatures other than man could, indeed, conquer syntax and link words into sentences, however simple...
...equally serious criticism has been made by Linguist Thomas Sebeok and his wife. Anthropologist Donna Jen Umiker-Sebeok, both at Indiana University. In the introduction to a collection of reports and essays on primate language experiments to be published this month under the title Speaking of Apes (Plenum: $37,50), they maintain that much of what passes for language skill in apes can be explained by the "Clever Hans effect"-a phenomenon named for a turn-of-the-century German circus horse that astounded audiences by tapping out with his hoofs the correct answers to complex mathematical and verbal problems...
...brilliant and charming man, a linguist who was liked by his colleagues and suburban Amsterdam neighbors. To be sure, Abdul Qadar Khan did seem a bit inquisitive to his fellow scientists at The Netherlands' top-secret gas centrifuge factory at Almelo, where enriched uranium is produced for nuclear plants around the world. On the other hand, asking questions was normal behavior for a bright young metallurgist who wanted to get ahead. After 17 days at the plant, however, Khan was politely but firmly told to leave Almelo, and went back to work in his Amsterdam laboratory. Shortly afterward...
DIED. Max Hayward, 54, English scholar who translated Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, and works by Solzhenitsyn and other Russian authors banned or banished in their own country; of cancer; in Oxford, England. A natural linguist, Hayward taught himself Russian as a teen-ager by plowing through an untranslated tome on gypsies. Between studying at Oxford in the '40s and returning there to teach in 1956, he spent two years in the British embassy in Moscow, where he developed a passionate concern for the literary culture stricken by Stalin's purges. He eventually became, said a colleague...
Although historically some anarchists have advocated terrorism to achieve their ends, many have rejected violent means. "I don't think anybody in their right minds advocates violence," Noam Chomsky, a renowned linguist and an anarchist himself, says. "I think what you achieve non-violently should be defended. Of course, some people feel that the redistribution of the country's wealth is a form of violence," he adds...