Advances in aphasia
I’m currently watching a new CBS series, Threshold. The premise is that the US government has a consultant who develops contingency plans for worst case scenarios. When one such scenario arises - namely, first contact with an alien intelligence (or artifact thereof) - a team is brought together to face the challenge. One member of the team, Arthur Ramsey (played by Peter Dinklage), is introduced as a “linguist and applied mathematician.” And he’s also a womanizer and a drinker. Cool! Or so one might think.
Actually, one might groan, expecting yet another use of the word linguist. However, with the first episode almost over, there’s really not much to say about how he’s a linguist, except that he obviously prefers to think about math more than human language. I say this because he has very interesting ideas about expressive aphasia. When a person exposed to the alien artifact goes rather mad and begins to attack people and utter strange sounds, Arthur says (paraphrasing)
(You don’t understand what he’s saying) because you’re not a linguist. To you it’s probably unintelligible word salad, but it’s actually very similar to what you see with people with expressive aphasia.
He goes on to explain that they often say things backwards, so here’s what we have to do to understand what he’s saying: play the tape backwards! Ingeneous.
Other linguist traits: ability to say “hello” in 200 dialects (not sure if he means varieties of a language or if he’s taken the “it’s all dialects” idea to heart), a fondness for pig latin, one use of the word adjective where word would be more natural, and the ability to have fractal patterns “speak to him” (math is just another language, after all). But apparantly the abilities do not doing acoustic analysis of the sounds given off by the artifact - this job goes to the astronautical engineer. I guess Ramsey is more of an S?