Can the world’s hearing
impaired understand
one another?
Sign language developed in a way
that’s similar to spoken language
but is probably even older. Thus
almost every country has its own
sign language and some have more
than one. Sign language has been
used for communication between
speakers of mutually unintelligible
languages in many of the regions of
the world. In Asia for example, the
Chinese and Japanese are able to
communicate by spelling out on the
palm of the hands the characters
the two languages share. And some
Native American tribes have used
a sign language to converse when
their spoken languages were too
distant to be mutually intelligible.
A system that’s sometimes called
International Sign Pidgin is used at
multinational events and is closer to
a full language than most pidgins.What does
a cat think
when you
call its name?
As all cat owners know, when you call your
pet cat by its name, it tends to ignore you.
But Japanese behavioral scientist Atsuko
Saito has discovered that—just like dogs—
domestic cats are able to recognize their
own name and can discriminate between
their owner’s voice and that of a stranger.
This may be because an owner’s utterance
of a cat’s name is usually associated with
some reward, such as food, play, or petting.
Other research shows cats are somewhat
sensitive to the emotions of their owner and
may be influenced by their human’s mood.
In other words, your cat can recognize your
vocal cues and gestures but may well be
choosing to ignore them.SIGN OF THE TIMES
More than 10,000 students and teachers at
China’s Changchun University set a new Guinness
World Record for most people performing sign
language simultaneously to the same song.
PHOTOS: Getty Images; BMW; Mevans/Getty; Tasakorn Kongmoon/EyeEm/Getty; Dusica Paripovic/500px/Getty; China News Service/Contributor/Getty.
May 2020 42 ideasanddiscoveries.com