Si Jambo!

This week has been very busy and the proactive quality of it all has left me in reasonably good spirits. Yesterday (or rather, two days ago) I had my last official Tanzania meeting before the real classes start and I got a Swahili name which I know is silly, but it still made me happy. My professor went around the oblong table asking people to stand and then gave a few people names. My name was Mahl-eye-ah-cah, pronounced quickly it sounds like "Metallica" , which means angel in Swahili.... u_u

Today I spent a large duration of time hammering out a ten page paper on the cognitive development of the Pan Paniscus and the question of linguistics in relation to these great apes. It was done a bit sloppy, but actually I really enjoyed the reading about the Bonobo chimpanzee Kanzi who was on 'the brink of human mind.' The chapter on the origin of language was so interesting and everything made sense. Animals such as primates don't use words which have definitive meaning and systematic layering like humans....they use a 'graded' system of speech where each sound has no exact start or finish and emotions can be as varied as the different shades of color in a rainbow. Gutteral sounds of pain, anguish, excitement and desire that all vary depending on exactly how you are feeling at the time and can be understood by one's counterparts. How cool would it be if we could talk like that =O Awesome. I have always wondered if language was more of a barrier than a bridge over a gap that confined our thoughts and feelings to the words that we could employ. Like, maybe instead of using speech to denote feeling..we were denoting feeling because of speech. Does that make sense? Well, I think we should be like lil chimps instead. It seems much more effective.

After my paper, I hung out with some buddies I haven't seen in awhile. We cooked some food and dessert and then sat around giving my one friend these sporadic acting tests and finally talked for almost two hours about what we would do if there was a zombie invasion. Hmm. Wonder if you could just pretend to be a zombie? Cover yourself in blood and jump into the zombie crowd and say "BRaAaaaaaINS" and start walking with them. Maybe that's what I would do. O_O