Monty Roberts, a Real Horse Whisperer

Many are familiar with the popular novel, The Horse Whisperer (1995) which was later made into The Horse Whisperer (1998), the movie directed by and starring Robert Redford. To write his incredible book that populated best seller lists, Nicholas Evans, author of The Horse Whisperer (1995), met Monty Roberts and heavily interviewed him among other knowledgeable horse trainers and owners before writing.

But while The Horse Whisperer is a work of fiction, what appeared on library shelves two years later, The Man Who Listens to Horses (1997), is the autobiography of Monty Roberts, a real-life horse whisperer. In his own book, Monty tells his remarkable journey with horses and how his horse training-methods have revolutionized horse training, from the violence and exercise of force and mastery previously used to the gentling methods of those today. Horses are not to be "broken" anymore but to be "gentled". 

Here is a postage-stamp version of the Monty Roberts story.

Source

Monty Roberts, born 14 May 1935, as a babe was held in the saddle in front of his mother as she trained neighborhood youngsters in the family riding school. By age 4 Monty was riding in shows and winning prizes. At age 7 he made a precocious and controversial discovery—the realization that horses have their own language, what he came to regard as “the language of Equus”, an extremely controversial thought at the time!

His father, a mean and violent horse trainer, also mean and violent with Monty, wouldn’t allow such a thought, and tried to beat (yes, physically) the thought out of Monty’s brain. Monty hated violence and despite the beatings, continued his observations on how horses communicate. By age 11 Monty was in the family rail car and riding across the country with typically 6 horses, a groom-trainer, and a school teacher. By this time he was known to be “professional” as his competitors were kids who actually attended school and merely rode on weekends, he swooped up the highest prizes rather consistently whenever and wherever he competed.

By age 13 he was taking summer trips to the Nevada desert to do mustang round-ups, and this was where he got the biggest epiphany on horse communication—from interactions at night between a young misbehaving stallion and the leading herd mare who was “punishing” the wayward youth! To be able to see these night interactions between the herd animals, Monty realized his rare achromatopic (complete colorblind) condition was actually a blessing, as it gave him ability to distinguish the textures of the night desert and not feel the loss of the colors!

On this earliest mustang roundup he observed a mare chasing a young rambunctious stallion 300 yards away from the herd and not allowing him to return. This ostracism is critical as it prevents group protection from the coyotes, wolves, mountain lions and other predators, and it is unnatural to be excluded as horses are herd animals and thrive in socializing family herds. The young stallion was chased out and the lead mare kept him ostracized by directly facing him, eyes riveted into him, with no letup on reprimanding stance or breaking of eye contact. After some minutes the young stallion started moving his mouth, and then sticking out his tongue a bit at times, actions that Monty later learned was his beginning to admit his submission to her authority. Following this, his head would drop to just inches off the ground while he continued with the mouth action. The mare was waiting for this submissive act and then would break eye contact and look a few inches in front of him. As he continued with his submissive movements and turning his body more and more laterally to her, an overt act of vulnerability and submission, her eyes would drift further in distance ahead of him, and she too would gradually turn laterally. The more she turned, the closer he approached. What was utterly astonishing to Monty, however, was how she showed her forgiveness to him after allowing him back into the herd, provided he continued expressing his submission and not misbehaving again. She would curry his mane, withers and around his tail gently with her lips and teeth and give him lots of attention as she welcomed him back, and forgave him. If he misbehaved, out he was chased again, and the process would be repeated.

For Monty, this was revolutionary! Horses had rules, meted out punishment, expressed forgiveness and caring love, and were in fact master trainers for raising “model” communities! Monty’s father used aggression, violent submission, force and cruelty in his horse-breaking methods, and Monty was quick to note the huge differences in both process and outcome. Monty developed training methods he gained from this mustang experience, and his horses were “broken” to saddle and bridle in an average of 30 minutes after meeting. His father’s violent method took 6 weeks, and the horse was forever damaged. Monty’s method was based on speaking the “language of Equus” with the horse and gaining its trust so that he could just quietly place the saddle on the horse, reassure the horse that it wasn’t a bad thing, and then slip the bridle on the horse with the same reassurance. Monty knew his father’s method of domination was inherently wrong, and Monty’s ultimate philosophy was that the horse is an honest soul and will tell you its story, if you but take the time to listen, as “the horse is always right”!

Monty’s Training Method

According to Monty, to break a horse in 30 minutes is not difficult if one speaks the “language of Equus”. The ideal method is to use a 50-foot arena, preferably without a lot of activity around it. The horse would be put in the arena for a time before Monty entered it in order for the horse to become familiar with the space rather than have too much unfamiliar stimuli at once during the initial gentling session. Then Monty would enter the arena with a rope, not to beat the horse at all, but to just flick the rope behind the horse to keep the horse circling at a nice pace. Monty, like the lead mare who was ostracizing the fractious youth, would squarely face the horse with eyes fixed on it and the horse would be running because he was realizing Monty spoke “Equus” and he, the horse, was being punished for something.

Once the horse started moving his mouth, and then lowering his head to just above ground level while moving his mouth and still making revolutions around Monty, Monty would adjust his eye focus to just in front of the horse. The horse would slow immediately, offer more submissive mouth movements with lowered head and the further Monty adjust his eye focus in front the horse, the slower the horse circled. Finally when Monty was no longer looking at the horse and his (Monty’s body) was turned laterally in the position of little awareness and in trusting vulnerability, the horse would gaze at Monty. Monty would then turn his back on the horse, being careful to never cut his eyes in any way to see how the horse was reacting, and just slowly walk away. The horse, the herd animal, would naturally approach Monty and with its muzzle over Monty’s shoulder, follow Monty trustingly around the arena.

After a couple minutes of “round-up”, Monty would turn and touch the spots of vulnerability—the spots where for example a mountain lion would grab if it attacked, many of the same spots that the mare had curried when she welcomed the fractious stallion back into the herd. Monty was saying with these touches, “You can trust me. I would never hurt you.” Monty would touch the vulnerability points, along the muzzle, the top of the head, along the mane, the throat, the flank, and as he developed his methods, he would even lift one hoof after another, an act that demanded ultimate trust as it denied the horse the ability to run when one of its hooves was lifted. With these acts allowed, the horse was acquiescent for allowing more acts of vulnerability, the adding of the saddle, and then the bridle. After each each piece of equipment was added, Monty would reassure the horse with appropriate touches, conveying his high regard and respect to the horse for the horse putting such trust in him. And so Monty could walk into an arena, and about 30 minutes later have a “green” horse introduced to a saddle and bridle and have a rider on his back for a few spins around the arena. Of course this was just the beginning of the training, but Monty did the initial horse “breaking”, a term that is actually a misnomer. The term in regard to Monty’s method should be more like “horse gentling”.

KNYSNA-PLETT HERALD

This book is the amazing journey of Monty from a small boy who never had a childhood or owned a toy to a grown man who, living and breathing with horses all of his life, learned a method of “horse breaking” that gained the horses trust and didn’t destroy its spirit. When Monty was into his 40s, Queen Elizabeth, quite the horsewoman herself, heard about Monty and invited him to Buckingham to see for herself his methods. She was amazed and she and Monty struck up quite the friendship which lasted for years, and developed further during many more visits. Until meeting Queen Elizabeth, Monty had learned to remain silent about his controversial gentling methods of training horses. After meeting such a renowned horse advocate, Monty started giving public demonstrations and instructions on his methods, and because of Queen Elizabeth’s keen passion for humanitarian treatment of horses and her passionate approval of Monty’s gentling methods, Monty’s ways became widely known … and even was the catalyst for this book!

Monty, beaten from ages 7 to 15, and often with a chain, refused to continue with the violence that he underwent growing up. His methods gentled the training methods of horses, and he and his wife with their big hearts and passion to help even youths at risk, over the years took in 47 foster kids (typically aged 12-14) who had a lot of baggage. They used the same methods of “herd mentality”, stern looks and welcoming touches as the mare had used. None of their kids were ever beaten, communication and love were the ingredients for a strong “family” tie. And Monty says that despite the heavy baggage that his 47 foster kids had, 40 of them were “successfully taught to fly”!

Definitely this book is a high recommend!

Zen Buddhism

The down-to-earth and simple common sense of some of the illustrations in Zen Comics put a nice twist on traditional outlooks. So to share a few that most humored me:

simple thinking ... and yet very profound!



 

 
Yep, silence is still golden :)

Alex & Me: Anecdotes on Language Acquisition

Many people are aware of the 30-year long relationship Irene Pepperberg had with her African Grey Parrot, Alex (roughly May 1976 – 6 September 2007). 

Irene Pepperberg was trained at Harvard in chemistry, but while writing her chemistry dissertation she became fascinated with the biological aspects of language acquisition in animals. She finished her chemistry dissertation but never used the degree directly. That said, however, she had learned many research and other transferable skills to enter into the biological field of animal psychology. She studied constantly -- about child acquisition of language, about animal cognition which at the time was believed to be almost non-existent. For years she battled disinterest in her studies, and especially flack from the scientific world in general; animals were strictly believed to be governed by instinct and intelligence wasn't to be considered. Until this time, language acquisition had only been testing in some primates, gorillas, and corvids (crows, ravens). Irene thought that a grey parrot, an animal known to talk, would be the ideal subject to research animal cognition and intelligence with, and so went to an exotic pet store to get one. One was arbitrarily scooped up, and that parrot became the famous talking Alex! 

Source

A video on YouTube "Alex: One of the smartest birds ever" shows some of his training to demonstrate that animals, precisely African Grey Parrots, can not only "parrot" humans but actually understand and communicate with them intellectually, rationally, intentionally - all aspects of intelligence previously denied possible in the animal world. Humans just couldn't wrap their brains around the fact that humans aren't positioned as the only "animals" that acquire and communicate with meaningful language.

Some anecdotes I pulled from the "Alex and Me" book, which become clearer after seeing this YouTube clip.

In his early years of training:

In training, Alex "was less interested in colors than the objects, probably because all the colors tasted the same, while the different objects had different tastes and textures."

"He loved chewing clothespins. We called them 'peg wood', which he picked up quickly. I then gave him a green clothespin, something he'd never seen before, and asked, 'What's this?' He looked at it and cocked his head a couple of times, obviously intrigued, as he often was with novel objects. He then looked at me and said, 'Green wood peg wood,' all one phrase. We hadn't modeled it, so this was striking. Of course, a perfect response would have been 'Green peg wood'. 

[Pepperberg's early initial struggles with funding and getting published in a time when there was a growing controversy in the field of ape-human communication .... and therefore if apes weren't given legitimacy in communication, certainly no 'bird-brain' was going to get it! She writes:  

The chimpanzee known as Washoe, for instance, in the care of Roger Fouts, had apparently coined the phrase "water bird" the first time she saw a swan; Koko the gorilla, the subject of Penny Patterson's research, seemingly described a zebra as a "white tiger". These efforts were garnering a lot of public attention (NOVA programs were just part of that; magazine and newspaper articles proliferated too). Yet linguists were expressing a growing unease over the claim that these animals had demonstrated a rudimentary facility for language. 

In November 1979, Science published a long paper by Herbert Terrace and several colleagues: "Can an Ape Create a Sentence?" It was to become a classic in the growing controversy.]

Some language acquisition with Alex was unplanned, for instance, in December 1980 Alex was taken to a washroom on researcher Kathy Davidson's shoulder and he noticed his reflection in the mirror for the first time. He looked into it, cocked his head, and asked, "What's this?" Kathy answered, "That's you. You're a parrot." Alex looked some more and then asked, "What color?" Kathy said, "Gray. You're a gray parrot, Alex." And that was how Alex learned the word grey.

After several years of work with Alex:

Alex as as grey was very affectionate and loved to have his head lightly scratched. Lab workers called it tickling, so Alex when he wanted attention sometimes would lower his head and say, "You tickle", meaning "scratch my head". One day a stuffed gray was on the desk where Alex worked. After a bit he went over to it, gave it a good look, and then lowered his head to the stuffed bird and said, "You tickle." When nothing happened, he did it again. Again nothing happened, so in a huff, Alex said, "You turkey," and walked off. "You turkey" was a phrase the lab students sometimes said to Alex when he was uncooperative.

Another phrase he picked up inadvertently was "Pay attention!" He had aspergillus infection, a killer, and had to be taken to the vet and put into a nebulizer to help him breathe in drugs for treatment. Of course he didn't like it in the confining nebulizer. He knew he had to "wait" until the bell went off after the treatment, but one time there was an emergency and when no one came after his timer went off, he rapped on the glass and said not only his unhappy-with-this-environment phrase of "Wanna go back", he called out, "Pay attention! Wanna go back!" He had picked up "Pay attention" from students who were testing him in the lab.

At the vets, Alex was popular during the day, but at night he was basically alone. One night the accountant stayed late, and Alex tried to communicate with her. She was working so therefore quiet, so Alex asked, "You want a nut?" "No, Alex." He persisted, "You want corn?" "No, thank you, Alex, I don't want corn." This went on for quite a while with the accountant trying to ignore him in order to do work. Finally, Alex apparently in exasperation said in a petulant voice, "Well, what do you want?" The accountant cracked up laughing and gave Alex the attention he was demanding.

After recovery, Alex was taken back to the lab, but he didn't seem interested. In response to the question "How many wool?" based on the number of wool pieces on a tray, Alex answered, "One." The correct answer was two. When asked again, he said, "Four." Back and forth, one and four. Finally Irene said he would have to go into time-out and put him in his private room away from people. He immediately called out from behind the closed door, "Two ... come here ... two." Yep, Alex had fully recovered and was up to his old tricks!

Of course Alex wasn't the only bird in the lab. There were others like Griffin and Wart. Both were younger than Alex and both were obtained years after Irene had bonded with Alex, so Alex was king in the lab. He always had to have the higher perch, be closer to Irene's face in pictures and in communal work, and was therefore bossier. When Griffin was asked a question and didn't answer immediately, Alex would call out the answer (and sometimes the incorrect one to confuse Griffin). If Griffin's pronunciation wasn't clear enough, Alex would call out, "Say better" and Griffin better sound better on the next try. 

Did Alex understand language? Well, what do you think? 

Irene came storming into the lab one day angry to lose funding for her research ... yet again. Alex looked at her, and said, "Calm down!" 

He babbled and played with sound when alone, for instance, "green, cheen, bean, keen ..." So one day while Irene was testing him with a photographer on a limited schedule, she was asking Alex questions related to phoneme sounds, something she'd never worked with Alex on, but because the interviewer was on a tight schedule Irene skipped giving Alex a reward for every correct answer because Alex eating a nut after each answer would take too much time. Alex was getting frustrated and at not being appropriately rewarded for his efforts and would call out, "Want nut!" He continued to answer each phoneme question correctly, despite never being asked such questions before, and after each would demand more loudly, "Want nut!" Finally, in exasperation Alex called out, "Want nut! Nnn ... uh ... tuh!" Irene was stunned! His response was equivalent to, "Hey stupid, do I have to spell it out for you?" 

Could Alex put thoughts together to create new meaning? Well, one day someone brought a birthday cake into the lab and everyone shared it, including the birds. Community was very important for fostering communication and relationships. When Alex got his piece, he appreciatively said, "Yummy bread." He had known "yummy" and "bread" before, but putting them together was totally Alex's idea.

The night before Alex died, September 2007. 

Alex stayed in the lab with the other birds, and every night before Irene would leave, she and Alex would say their parting words. Wart and Griffin said nothing.

Alex: "You be good. I love you."
Irene: "I love you too."
Alex: "You'll be in tomorrow?"
Irene: "Yes. I'll be in tomorrow."

And those were the last words Alex spoke to her, "You be good. I love you!" Irene treasures them!

China: Influenced by and Influencing the West

"Western Knowledge Flowing into the East"

Since the 16th century, with the opening of sea routes and development of sea trade, the distance between the East and the West drew closer and closer. Europeans could come into direct contact with the mysterious Orient, discovery complexity and the richness of Chinese civilization, and the Maritime Silk Road was the link of communication between the two worlds.

European merchants and missionaries unceasingly arrived to promote and market their lifestyles, religion and sense of values, while the mainstream mentality of the Chinese empire responded mostly with defense, restriction and objection. The delineation between Chinese and foreign things and the notion that "our heavenly kingdom is perfect in every way" severely hindered the rational observation and awareness of the world outside of China.

From the Ming to early Qing, foreign missionaries, while carrying out missionary work, also introduced Western science and technology to the Chinese and ultimately advanced the development of science and technology for the Ming-Qing China.

Map-making

Well-known missionary Matteo Ricci was a literati, and at the same time, affluent in astronomy, calendric systems, geography, mathematics and engineering, among other knowledge and fields of study. After coming to China, he continually presented Western sciences to Chinese governmental officials and scholars, especially the knowledge of astronomy and geography. In Zhaoqing City, Matteo Ricci re-illustrated the map of the Western world, accompanied by Chinese annotations (this is the famous Complete Map of the Earth's Mountains and Seas). In 1601, after entering Beijing, Matteo Ricci made special efforts to illustrate the Complete Map of the Myriad Countries of the World, in which he divided the earth into "five continents" and "five zones" [terms still used today unlike the Western concepts of the seven continents and the seven seas]. The five continents were Asia, Europa, Libia (Africa), Americhe and Magellanica (Antarctica); the five zones were the north frigid zone, north temperate zone, tropical zone, south temperate zone and south frigid zone. And to suit the traditional concept and custom of China [that yellow represents the emperor and since yellow is central, the emperor must be in central position], Matteo Ricci placed China at the center of the map, making Emperor Wanli quite pleased. [Typically when a country makes a map, their country is centrally located.]

Source - Jesuit missionaries, like Fr. Matteo Ricci, and Adam Schaal von Bell (above) recognized that the coherence between the teachings of Christianity and those of Confucius, made Chinese civilization receptive to Western Science.

Matteo Ricci introduced to the Chinese that the earth was round, as well as concepts of the north and south poles, the equator, longitudes and latitudes, to name a few. The new knowledge completely overthrew "the heaven is round and the earth is square" theory, and widened the horizon of many Chinese.

After Matteo Ricci, there was Didace de Pantoja (1571-1618) who was ordered by Emperor Wanli to translate the European map (a work which remained unfinished). In 1623, Giulio Aleni (1582-1649) completed the An Extra Record of Geography, a book illustrating the customs and geography of the countries in five continents, a rather complete account of world geography. In the early Qing Dynasty, missionaries including Luigi Buglio (1606-1677) and Ferdinand Verbiest together compiled the Important Accounts of the Western World, specially devoting attention on Western countries, their people and routes, a book which complemented Matteo Ricci and Giulio Aleni's works.

Source - Beijing observatory, designed and built by Fr. Ferdinand Verbiest.

The Italian Jesuit missionary Martino Martini (1607-1661) on the basis of field surveys, combined academic achievements from Chinese and foreign scholars, published the New World Map and the Map of the Chinese Empire in Augsburg in 1654. The following year he published Novus Atlas Sinensis (New Atlas of China) in Amsterdam (it's contents were detailed and precise), and Martini was considered the "father of geographical studies on China" in the West.

In 1707, Emperor Kangx ordered missionaries Joachim Bouvet (1656-1730), Jean-Baptiste Regis (1663-1738) and Pierre Jartoux (1668-1720) along with Chinese scholars He Guodong, Ming Antu and others to organize a cartography team, which then traveled to every province of China. Using longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates, they drew a detailed map of China: Complete Map of the Empire of Kangxi, a cartographic work considered very advanced.

Calendars

In 1601, Matteo Ricci had recommended the Western calendar to Emperor Wanli in Beijing, and Matteo along with scholar Li Zhizao and others finished many works, including Illustrated Explanation of the Sphere and Astrolabe, by using the Western calendar, knowledge in mathematics and in geography.

Following Ricci, other Jesuit missionaries like Didace de Pantoja, Sabbathin de Ursis (1575-1620), Nicolas Longobardi (1559-1654) Jean Terrenz (1576-1630), Johann Adam Schall von Bell arriving in China were affluent in astronomical calendars. They served the Chinese government by translating western teachings, participated in the revision of the calendar, made astronomical equipment, and contributed to the reforms of the calendric systems of the Ming and Qing dynasties, which ultimately abolished the old system of Datong Calendar and implemented the new Shixian Calendar.

Other Developments

During the Ming and Qing dynasties, missionaries introduced other Western disciplines to China, some of which included physics, agronomy, biology, medicine, architecture, music, fine arts, linguistics, philosophy, and more. There were also hands-on executions in the areas of horology, firearms, gardening, to name a few.

China Influencing Europe and America

Since the 16th century, Europeans who visited China were mostly missionaries, and they introduced a great deal of Chinese culture to the West. The missionaries studied Chinese literature and were pioneering figures in Western Sinology, and profoundly influencing modern cultural development in Europe. The Jesuits periodically reported in writing to the Church about developments in China, and these writings were the most crucial materials for informing Europe about Chinese thinking and culture.

Chinese literary works translated by missionaries included The Doctrine of the Mean, The Great Learning, and The Analects of Confucius by Prosper Intercetta (1599-1666), Confucius Sinarum Philosophus by Philippe Couplet (1624-1692), The Four Books, Book of Filial Piety, and Learnings for Children by Franciscus Noel (1651-1729), Idea Generalis Doctrinae libri Ye Kin by Joachim Bouvet, The Book of History by Antoine Gaubil (1689-1759), and more.

In the 18th century, translated by Jesuit missionaries, as many as 15 volumes of Chinese works on history, science, arts, and customs appeared in Europe. And disseminators of Chinese culture beyond missionaries were the journal logs of navigators along with adventurers and merchants to China.

Evidence of Chinese influence beyond China

18th century French ideologist Denis Diderot (1713-1784), Baron d'Holbach (1723-1789) and leaders of the French Enlightenment movement Montesquieu (1689-1775) and Voltaire (1694-1778) appreciated traditional Chinese culture and were keen to absorb its soul. Voltaire especially was an advocator of Chinese philosophy, ethics, and politics, and in his eyes, Confucius was greater than Jesus. Voltaire dreamed of finding a "rational religion" in which Confucius served as its model.

Traditional Chinese thinking with "emphasis on agriculture" profoundly impacted "physiocratic" theories of French economists Francois Quesnay (1694-1774) and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1727-1781). German philosopher Leibniz (1646-1716) was fascinated by the Yi Jing (The Book of Changes) and diagram of the 64 hexagrams, which influenced his Monodology and Natural Law. The great Russian author Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) performed systematic studies on Chinese thinking and culture late in his life, particularly praising Lao Zi, whom he referred to as his "most adored philosopher".

 

 The eight trigrams and the 64 hexagrams

 

In the 1760s British classical economist Adam Smith (1723-1790) learned of Chinese physiocracy and policies through Francois Quesnay, and this knowledge became a principle ideology behind his classical masterpiece on political economy, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Wealth of Nations).

In the 17th and 18th centuries large quantities of Chinese silk, porcelain and tea in fad proportions were shipped to Europe, along with household items like fans, sedan chairs, wallpapers, and garments, Eastern cultural additions which brought a poetic and fresh feeling to the West. 

 

Pair of large imari vases

From the 1770s to the 1780s, the pinnacle of "Chinese fashion" manifested in consumer fashion as well as in art style. The art style was a rebellion and negation against the Baroque art style that dominated Europe before the 18th century. This new style called "Rococo", originating from the French word "rocaille," which means having the characteristics of fineness, lightness, flamboyance, intricacy and dynamism. This style primarily influences landscape architecture that advocated Chinese fresco with floral patterns, home furniture with Chinese flower and bird paintings, Chinese prints, etc. Rococo art was popular in Europe for about a century until neoclassicism in the 1760s emerged and gradually became the mainstream art of Europe.

 

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Text Source:

 

This fascinating selection was taken from Li Qingxin's 2006 book "Maritime Silk Road", translated by William W. Wang, and published by China Intercontinental Press, pp. 183-189. An absolute read for the historian!

Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai

Ruiyan Xu, a Chinese, born and raised in Shanghai for the first ten years of her life and then transported to the US where she was immersed in English but knew not a word, wrote her first novel, a novel in part biographical, a novel on aphasia. Aphasia is typically an impairment of language, either of reception or production, but which does not affect intelligence. When Ruiyan later learned about aphasia in one of her university classes, she felt a connection because as a child, she felt lost in her abrupt move to the US when she was suddenly stripped of her language and her familiar social cues which replace language. Struggling with identity and language, Ruiyan identifies and creates a character similarly stripped of language and presented with a new life, one he would have to come to terms with as she as a child came to terms with English. 

Her first book, The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai

The central character Li Jing had been raised in the US until 10 where he had acquired English, his first language. However, at the age of 10 his architect father had returned with young Li Jing to Shanghai and Li Jing had forgotten his English as he replaced it with Chinese. Years later as president of his own investment company, he charismatically meets, greets, manipulates and assures people and huge businesses of his savvy ability to invest their money. He is articulate. He is in control. And he is very good at what he does. However, his drive, his ability, his confidence is all blown up when an explosion in a building he and his father are in causes the building to collapse. His father, Professor Li, has a heart attack and soon dies, but Li Jing's damage goes much deeper. Physically Li Jing was scratched and bruised but mentally he was wounded, permanently, by a spray of exploding glass that struck his forehead and damaged the unique area in his brain where language is produced, Broca's area.

Source

The brain is complex, interwired, but also compartmentalized. Broca's area is the area which centralizes language production, meaning if that area is damaged, the person can still understand and receive language but just not be able to produce it. Wernicke's area, an area of the brain also on the left side of the brain but positioned further behind but not adjacent to Broca's is its counterpart and it is responsible for language reception. Damage to Wernicke's would have been much more serious as without understanding language, no language but only fluent sounds that are like language, could be produced. Li Jing woke from the accident to ... not no language, but limited English, the language of his childhood. His Chinese has been completely wiped from his mind.

Over night Li Jing loses his voice, therefore his ability to run his own company, his confidence, and most sadly his connection to his wife. She speaks Chinese. He speaks limited English. How do you speak of love, patience, offer encouragement, express sorrow or share remembrances without the language that linked you? The loss of both languages, Chinese and the language of love, are his inheritance from the explosion. The book takes them both on a journey of only having the past holding them together. The journey is long and remains long even as the book closes with Li Jing and son Pang Pang suddenly meeting wife/mother Meiling in a public park with glistening stretches of Chinese calligraphy being painted between them by a street artist. They carefully step around the rich and beautiful strokes of language on the ground as they slip from the public area to their private home ... as a family, leaving the Chinese behind them and possibilities of other language in front.

________________________________________________________________________

Do I recommend this book? Well, it wasn't what I thought it would be. From the cover I had assumed it would be more of a study on language and identity with some deeper insights into Broca's area and more on the medical journey aspect, perhaps like the Still Alice on Alzheimers and The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her Doctors, and a Collision of Two Cultures on epilepsy. The first half of the book promised that too, but the last half seemed to twist away from anything medical and the story oozed into a love triangle story, albeit the theme was still on language and identity. So while the first half was very enjoyable and I felt transported to Shanghai in the reading, the last half lost its rhythm and I didn't gain anything through the read. If you have my expectations for learning something from reading, then I don't recommend it. However, if you do want a book on language and identity with romance thrown in, then here is a good recommend.

Talking Hands: Signing in an Israeli Village

Margalit Fox, a New York Times reporter trained as a linguist, is the only Western journalist to have set foot in the remarkable Bedouin community in Israel where there is an unusually high rate of deafness. Margalit’s book Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals about the Mind (2007) is the outcome of her three-day immersion visit to the village with expert sign linguists. To be allowed into the village as an observer, Margalit had some background in American Sign Language but was under no circumstances to “speak” to anyone during the three days. She was allowed to document but not allowed to contaminate the pure sign language that had evolved in the previous 70 years into a third-generation language. Margalit explored the visit with an analysis of the unique syntactic sign language which was very different from the Israeli Sign Language (ISL), the sign language of the country.

Of Al-Sayyid’s 3,500 residents, about one in 25 is deaf—4% of the population! In Israel and the United States, the incidence of deafness in the general population is about 0.1 percent or one in a 1,000! Unlike in those areas, in Al-Sayyid there is no stigma against being deaf, and because of the high rate of deafness, and because of the remoteness of the village, the rest of the village sees deafness as normal and the majority of hearing villagers are bilingual, signing their local sign language while also speaking Hebrew.

Seventy years ago the first deaf child was born to the community and soon followed by nine more. In this first cohort of deaf children sprouted the pidgin sign which blossomed into the highly communicative local sign language three generations later. However, in the present generation the young deaf children are bussed to a neighboring village to be educated with Israeli Sign Language and linguists are madly trying to document the local sign language that is now  being infiltrated with more and more ISL. Thus, Margalit’s visit with linguists to Al-Sayyid.

Speakers and signers work side by side with almost no job being exclusive for either a speaker or a signer. In fact, the whole village has evolved into a speaking-signing village, but this is not new. From the early 1700s to mid-1900s Martha’s Vineyard had two up-island towns (West Tisbury and Chilmark) where the villagers had so intermarried that their incidences of deafness was one in 49 in Tisbury and one in 25 in Chilmark, just as it is in Al-Sayyid. Also like in Al-Sayyid, signing among all of the townspeople had evolved but was very difficult if not impossible for signing outsiders to understand. Apparently and unique to signing in the United States, Martha’s Vineyard sign language evolved from British Sign Language as 40% of the signs were found to have British cognates while only 22% had overlap with ASL. Martha’s Vineyard sign language was active for about 250 years until islanders started marrying off-islanders, diluting the recessive deaf gene. No deaf signers from Martha’s Vineyard are alive today. Similarly, the demise of the local sign language at Al-Sayyid is expected to rapidly decline, also to marriages outside of the village and with the more globalized education of bussing the young to broader educational opportunities outside of the Al-Sayyid community.

Interesting Points Related to Signing Noted by Margarit Fox

• Al-Sayyid sign language has not evolved differently because of differences related to gender. However, sign language for Dublin’s deaf children was introduced in the mid 1800s by two Dominican nuns but taught in two gender isolated institutions—St. Mary’s School for Deaf Girls and St. Joseph’s School for Deaf Boys. The schools rarely mixed and thus their language evolved radically differently. However, the deaf girls frequently married the deaf boys with the girls learning the dialect of their husbands, making them bilingual Irish Sign Language users. Husbands rarely deigned to learn the dialect of the women as it was viewed as an inferior dialect. With children using the “male” dialect for schooling and interactions, the women’s dialect gradually disappeared.

• In 1917 Thomas Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc opened the Connecticut Asylum for teaching the French version of sign language (the British refused to teach Gallaudet).

• Nicaragua had no widespread education for the deaf until the 1970s. In 1977 a small 50-pupil school was opened and this cohort brought their many home-signs which started a more universal Nicaraguan sign language. The first cohort of students never really attained fluency but they did establish a mean of communication, much like a pidgin language. The second cohort came in 1983 and attached grammar, fluency and syntax to the pidgin, creating a Creole. In the space of just a few years the full-blown Nicaraguan Sign Language had evolved.

• American Sign Language (and perhaps Al-Sayyid Sign Language) evolved into signs for complex words on seemingly an infinite rage and nuance, from compounds to constellations of inflections. As one researchers states, “The existence of such elaborate formal inflectional devices clearly establishes ASL as one of the inflecting languages of the world, like Latin, Russian, and Navajo.”

• Spoonerisms are the reversal of two speech sounds, often with a humorous effect, and were made famous by the Oxford don, Reverend William A. Spooner (1844-1930). Examples:

“the queer old dean”
“noble tons of soil”
“You have hissed all my mystery lecture. I saw you fight a liar in the back quad; in fact, you have tasted the whole worm.” (said to reprimand a student)

Or others not attributed to Spooner:

“Don’t throw your cigarette down, there’s a hire fazard.”
“Who am I to sneeze at a flee runch?”
“We’re having a rot post for dinner.”
“fash and tickle”
“Wing’s babliography”

• Linguists study slips of the tongue to reveal info about language—language structure, language acquisition and historical language change. For signers, slips of the hand can similarly reveal the structure and organization of language.

• Sign language is of “vertical” construction. People can speak faster than they can sign, with the ASL signers producing about two signs per second to typical speakers of English saying about four words per second. However, sign language has “vertical” construction which allows words to be pluralized by a shift in the hand or questions asked by the tilt of the head. In fact, these subtle sign cues make signing easier comparable to spoken English.

• The most commonly word order for spoken languages in the world is SOV, e.g. Japanese and Korean. The local languages of Al-Sayyid are Arabic, a SVO (Standard Arabic is VSO) and Hebrew, also SVO. Israeli Sign Language, however, is relatively free, but the most common orders are SVO and OSV. The local sign language wasn’t specified, but it is modality-driven, has WH-questions tagged on the end, and is clearly a structure consistent language. Imagine that--a language evolving in a mere 70 years!

8 Modern Advancements the Moors Brought to Europeans

The YouTube clip "When Black Men Ruled the World: THE MOORS" (3:05 minutes) sheds light on a little known fact -- on historically, who really was intellectually superior and developed.

“Moors were commonly viewed as being mostly black or very swarthy, and hence the word is often used for negro,” The Oxford English Dictionary

The Moors established an Empire spanning parts of northern Africa to southern Europe, ruling in Europe for nearly 800 years (711-1492 AD), which is longer than Europeans have been out of the Dark Ages,

In fact, the Moorish advances in mathematics, astronomy, art and agriculture brought Europe out of the Dark Ages and into the Renaissance. 

1 - UNIVERSAL EDUCATION — While Christian Europe had a 99% illiteracy rate, 2 universities and 0 libraries, the Moors had 17 universities in 7 cities along with over 70 libraries. The Moors introduced their education system to Europe, bringing it out of 1,000 years of intellectual gloom.

2 - FASHION AND HYGIENE — The Moor Ziryab pioneered the concept of changing clothes based on seasons. He also created deodorant, daily bathing, and invented toothpaste. He made popular the concepts of shaving, haircuts, and hair washing among men.

3 - CUISINE — Ziryab introduced the concept of the three-course meal, which included the soup, main course and desert. The Moors introduced a number of crops that remain prominent in Spain today.

4 - URBAN UTILITIES — Moorish cities had street lights, hospitals, and running water. Paved and lighted streets did not appear in London or Paris for hundreds of years later. Moors built an aqueduct that brought water from the mountains to the city.

5 - MEDICINE — The “father of modern surgery” was the Moor Al Zahrawi, who developed innovative and precise surgical instruments, as well as the premier textbook of Western medical training.

6 - HUMAN FLIGHT — The Moor Ibn Firnas made the first scientific attempt to fly. Although his flight worked, his landing was unsuccessful.

7 - ADVANCED AGRICULTURAL TECHNIQUES — The Moors introduced Spain to rice, hard wheat, cotton, and more. Along with this came knowledge of crop irrigation and cultivation, building underground grain silos that stored grain for up to 100 years.

8 - PAPER MAKING — Moors introduced paper making to Spain, allowing for accurate preservation and dispersal of knowledge.

The Moon by Whale Light

The Moon by Whale Light … and Other Adventures among Bats,Penguins, Crocodilians, and Whales by Diane Ackerman. Diane Ackerman, one of my recent favorite authors, paints herself as a glorious animal-lover and –researcher. Her book The Moon by Whale Light is an insightful look at some of what I at first thought a most random selection of animals. Well, actually after reading the book I still think the animal selection is random but her deep zoological perspectives of the animals is not random but in fact astute, learned and is a wealth of behavioral comments gleaned from field research carried out with long-term professionals. Each of the four chapters dedicated to (1) bats (mammals), (2) crocodilians (reptiles), (3) whales (cetaceans), (4) penguins (aves) explores the animals’ use to man and man’s relationship with them. She also offers many intriguing and little known behaviors and knowledgeably creates the animals in their own highly structured and functional society, a perspective that few humans consider possible for “the lower species”.

So I have collected just a few thoughts on each of the animals, but this book is a jewel for animal-lovers. I so very highly recommend it!

On Bats

Merlin Tuttle, the world’s authority on bats, says, “Bats are among the gentlest of animals. They’re really shy and winsome creatures who have just had bad press.”

Bats are a natural pesticide. They eat 150 tons of insects every night. (Bracken Cave, San Antonio, TX) In fact, bats eat so much food in one evening of foraging that they weigh 50% heavier after one night of dining. An example of their insect gluttony, little brown bats of a common North American species catch as many as 600 insects in an hour.

Bats fly with their mouths open so they can echolocate, but which people mistakenly attribute to a snarling demeanor. They are not snarling, they are not mean, they’re just trying to not bump into anything.

Big brown bat
Picture taken from "The Why Files: The Science behind the News" in its feature "Stopping the Slaughter of Bats"

Bats are extremely tidy, comb themselves thoroughly, and do not gather a mess of nesting materials for their homes like birds. They provide excellent tender care of their young as well.

Cave walls are typically around 57F, but bat babies need to maintain body temperature of around 102F as they are born hairless (these cave conditions are the equivalent of a human lying naked on a cement floor). Therefore, caves chambers that have little moisture and shaped to retain heat become nurseries and babies cling from the ceiling packed with hundreds of other babies waiting for their mothers to return from their hunts and wrap their wings around the young. If bat nurseries are disturbed, the bats must move further back in the cave, where it is likely colder and many babies die. Only one young is raised per year so bats are at risk of not maintaining colony numbers if disturbed.

Even a person passing near a bat which is hibernating causes the bat to raise its body temperature in order to make a retreat if necessary, but this seemingly harmless elevation costs the bat 10-30 days of stored fat.

Bats are rapidly declining due to people not understanding them and killing them off. They have been victims of bat shoots, poison, attacked by flame throwers, napalm-bombed from the air, and dynamited. They have ultra-sensitive hearing and even the blast of a cherry bomb in a cave could kill their ultra-sensitive hearing and confuse a whole cavern of bats so that they can no longer use echolocation, and thus die.

Bats were once as numerous as the passenger pigeon. Old-timers remember when gray bats filled the night sky and now officially they are on the endangered list. The free-tailed bat has declined as much as 99.9% in some places. Its biggest colony went from 30 million to 30 thousand in just six years!

What people don’t realize is that bats are ESSENTIAL for maintaining the balance of nature! They fertilize bananas and maintain the wild strain which is disease-resistant. They plant the rain forest. Of the 3000 or so strains of peaches, which all started in China, bats were the seed dispensers and the pollinators. Bats pollinate many fruits, and bats and bees the the world’s greatest pollinators. Without them, earth would struggle to exist.

On Crocodilians

All crocodilians have a third transparent eyelid (or nictitating membrane), or goggles of a sort, so they can swim underwater. Their pupils are football-shaped and stay vertical to the horizon no matter what angle the head turns. Even if the gator tilts its head straight up, the pupil floats like a gyroscope, so vision isn’t distorted.

While mammals are extravagant with their energy, reptiles are extremely energy efficient and don’t expend energy unless they have to as they take their energy from external sources. Their inferno must be stoked carefully and kept at a precise temperature. If the temperature is incorrect, they cannot digest their food, but their efficiency is shown in their need for only three or four good meals a year.

Alligators have about 80 teeth (and crocodiles 70) and loose teeth throughout their lifespan. New teeth push up through the socket to replace old ones and an alligator, whose lifespan parallels a human’s, might have as many as 3,000 teeth. [Fun trivia: colonials used to fill up alligator’s teeth, which are hollow, with gun powder.]

A large gator, swinging its tail to counterweight the enormous head, stretches its head out of the water, gulps air then lowers itself in the water to make a sub-sonic boom when it bellows, making the water dance high around its body. Researchers note that alligators are responsive to the pitch of b-flat; when hearing b-flat tones, they go nuts with bellowing.

A mother alligator lays 35 or so porcelain eggs, which are incubated for about 65 days. Crocodilians do not have sex chromosomes; their gender is determined by the temperature at which they develop, and 2-3 weeks after the egg being laid, ambient air temperature determines the gender: 94+F produces males, 86-F produces females. Most often an entire nest is one gender, but in some cases, the top 2-3 eggs might be different based on their exposure to a different air temperature.

The first year is tough for an alligator. Yearlings are about 2 feet long and three-quarters of them die because they are eaten by fish, frogs, wading birds, to name a few. As they gain size, this risk is minimized, but then two- to three-year-olds are chased by adult alligators to protect territories and families, and a three-year-old which is about three and a half feet becomes a wanderer. In most reptiles, especially crocodilians, reproduction depends on size, not age, and some crocodilians might reproduce at 6 years of age while others at 15 for some males or 18 for females who develop later. By 30, a male alligator in the wild shows signs of senility, loses its teeth which aren’t replaced, becomes mottled and rough-skinned, and may even go blind. However, a male in captivity may grow as old as 90.

On Whales

If you ask someone to draw a picture of a whale, he/she will likely draw a sperm whale with its bulbous head made famous by Melville’s Moby Dick, but whales come in many shapes, sizes and colors … with 77 species of whales and dolphins inhabiting earth.

Whales are divided into two groups—toothed whales (Odontoceti from the Latin for “tooth” and “whale”) and baleen whales (Mysticeti, from Latinized Greek for “whale”). Toothed whales include sperm whales, dolphins, and orcas/killer whales. They have a single blowhole, echolocate like bats, have teeth for holding prey like fish, squid and shrimp but despite teeth, swallow their food whole. Baleen whales have paired blowholes—nostrils in fact. They graze with their mouths wide open, and the baleen with smooth outer edges and bristly inners catches the krill, plankton, and schools of fish while water passes on through. Other species with baleen have throat pleats and open their mouths even wider to swallow prey when the water is pressed to the top of the mouth and wrung out.

The Right whale, a Mysticeti, got its name from the age of whaling when a whaler would see a whale and ask if it were “the right one”. The Right whale floated when killed instead of sinking, didn’t struggle in battle, and was extremely valuable for its baleen. Now the Right whale is one of the rarest whale species (only 3,500 remaining) due to human greed. Never have humans caused an animal with widespread distribution across the globe to come to extinction, but they sure have come close in the case of the Right whale.

The Gray whale of the North Atlantic became extinct by the end of the 1700s because of Basque whalers, but the Grays in the North Pacific were “discovered” in the 19^th C and called devilfish; they were furiously hunted and in self-defense killed several men and smashing boats in the hunt. Now they are known for “the friendly whale phenomenon” which started in 1977 when a friendly whale near Baja California allowed itself to be patted by passengers on a whale watching boat. Since then, friendly whales have sought out boats, and on occasion rammed them and then rolled over to beg for belly rubs.

Blue whales make loud, low-frequency “songs” that can travel up to 500 miles in deep sound channels before disappearing into background noise.

A Humpback has paddle-like flippers and a huge tail with markings as unique as fingerprints, but its most arresting feature is it sings complicated, beautiful songs and varies them as it continuously sings.

When a whale exercises in warm equatorial waters, it can die of overheating. A whale is like a house with a too-large furnace and too few radiators. If it races too much for its food, it can become hot and can virtually blow up. Even after a whale is killed in the Antarctic, it must quickly be hauled aboard and cut up, for if it takes too long to drag the whale back to the ship for evisceration or is left in the water too long, its bones will be charred by the heat of its internal decay.

Most sperm whales live close to the equator and so dive to unimaginable depths to get to freezing water to cool off. They feed on squid and large fish, sometimes swallowing a whole shark. In the depths of the ocean and swimming under extreme pressure among luminescent fish, no wonder the sperm whales seems magical.

A mother whale is virtually 97% water, lives in water, sounds in water which travel through water and ultimately to her unborn who hears her, but because there is no air in the womb, the baby cannot speak back until it is born one year later.

On Penguins, those feathered dinosaurs

Penguins have no land predators, so they do not fear people. Just the opposite, they are curious and alert and allow their babies to waddle around and freely explore.

Penguins do NOT live at the South Pole, which is about 800 miles from the closest body of water and an altitude of almost 10,000 feet. Nor do they live with Eskimos and polar bears in the Arctic.

There are 17 types of penguins on earth, and while all penguins are essentially black and white, their head markings are what make them most easily identifiable.

·      Adelie penguins (named after Adelie Land near the Antarctic coast of Australia that was named after the wife of a 19^th C French explorer) have black heads with chalk-white eye rings—like little men in tuxedo suits.

·      Rock-hoppers have lively red eyes, long yellow and black head feathers resembling an outgrown crew cut, and thick yellow satanic eyebrows that slant upwards.

·      Chinstraps get their name from the thin black “strap” across their throats; their amber eyes are outlined in thick black and look Egyptian.

·      Emperors have black heads, a tawny stripe on their bill, and a bib of egg-yolk yellow around their necks and cheeks.

·      King penguins, the most flamboyant of all, display a large velvety-orange comma on each cheek, which melts to a radiant yellow, and on either side of their bills, a comet of apricot or lavender darts toward their mouth.

·      Fairy penguins are tiny and blue-headed.

Click to enlarge
Photos taken at Sea World just outside of Honolulu, Hawaii (a horrible place to visit -- the focus is on making money, e.g. $140 to kiss a dolphin and $18 a photo (and you can't take a camera in with you to get your own photo))

The black and white of penguins has very specific purposes. First, for protection—black backs make them less visible from above and white breasts make them appear like a reflection of water from below. For heat—if the penguin is cold, they turn the black towards the sun and warm up but turn white towards the sun if they are hot. An interesting study showed that when penguins were tagged with silver, they were quickly eaten by leopard seals which were attracted to the flash of the silver, so black tags were then used and the penguins were no longer at a disadvantage for becoming a targeted lunch.

Only 4 penguin types live in the Antarctic and only 2 live there exclusively. Most live in slightly balmier climates—on sub-Antarctic islands like South Georgia or the Falklands, along the coast of South America, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, and one species even lives in the Galapagos near the equator, but penguins do not and have never lived north of the equator. The ocean currents aren’t favorable for carrying them that far north.

Penguins come in a broad range of sizes. The Emperor penguin is the tallest and stands over five feet tall, weighing as much as 100 pounds while in contrast the smallest penguin, the fairy, weighs only 2 ½ pounds and stands a mere 12 inches tall.

Penguins waddle around and are believed by many to be flightless birds, but they do fly—they fly through water, and gracefully too, at speeds up to 15 miles per hour. They porpoise to breathe in just enough air to keep the lungs from collapsing and dive to great depths, with their pulse going from 100 beats per minute to only 20, and because they take only one shallow breath in their porpoise-move, they don't get the bends.

Penguins don’t have binocular vision like humans do, so they turn one eye to an object and then the other. Although they see well underwater, long vision on land isn’t necessary.