Linguistics caught my fascination, realizing that in natural language lie the metaphors for how we interpret and relate with the world in which we live. After learning Spanish and speaking it for over seven years, I am convinced that our attitudes can be shifted by the nature of our expression, that between the language and the culture there is an undeniable feedback loop, that societies and their language are close reflections of each other. In some languages there is no word for possession or for or Which of course means, that language can be a tool for change.

Regarding vocabulary, if a language lacks a word for a specific concept, it's considerably more difficult to think about the concept or to examine it logically in order to understand it, or to use it for classifying or organizing things. For example, a study of an Amazonian tribe, the Piraha, who don't have words for numbers, suggests that these people have difficulty with numerical concepts in tasks where memory is involved, even though they presumably can recognize differences in size of small collections of things.

In that regard, Edward Sapir wrote: "No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality."

More later...

Interesting Resources:

http://nlp.stanford.edu/

Neron is a phenomenon! Being an only child, he tapped into his precocious talent and discovered how to play catch with himself. Necessity is the mother of invention. He whips his head to toss the plastic ring, looks attently to see where it landed, retrieves it to bring it back to his bed, and starts all over again.

It´s even better when he returns the toys to the bean bag because he launches himself in an olympic jump into the bean bag with his legs stretched out in perfect form. Home free! And then he´s out as quickly as he landed to go fetch the toy again like a ricocheting ping pong ball .

Neron is the first dog I have ever known that cleans up after himself. He is a gatherer and at the end of the day collects up all his toys in his bed. It´s the Lost and Found where I ccasionally find those missing earrings or socks.

I guess that´s why they were retriever dogs by nature. Some interesting background. Standard Poodles, the largest size, were originally a water retrievers. They are still good swimmers, like their ancestors, and even have webbed feet. The name poodle is closely related to the English word puddle. It is known as "Puddeln" or "Pudel" in German, meaning a water dog or one that likes splashing in water. In France, the Poodle is known as the "Caniche" or Duck Dog, from its role retrieving duck. A Standard Poodle is a "Caniche Royale"

And those haircuts had a use! The distinctive cuts associated with poodles are a vestige of their original reprieving roles. They were developed to lighten the dogs' coats and improve their swimming ability, with balls of hair left protect their joints and vital organs from the cold in winter. Even the coloured ribbons in poodles' topknots had a practical function - allowing hunters to identify their own dogs at a distance in the water.

We are thinking that the french poodle combined with a spiked collar would be a good look. A sort of metrosexual poodle look--well groomed and masculine.

I am SO precocious. I learned to sit, stay, and come in one sitting. I am asking to take latin classes next week -- or maybe chess in order to give Deep Blue a run for his money.

We now go on walks together which you might think for me is a brave act since the buses roar by, the pedestrians are brusque, and there are dog walkers with up to 10 dogs in one group. No problem, they don´t even dream of messing with my 1.5 kilos of ferociousness. And those other dogs at the dog park--I run circles around them. In the beginning it I could barely make it down a city block because the whole world, groups of school kids, men, but particularly old ladies, said "ahhhhhhhhh, mira lo que es" and stopped to pet me.

no son creados iguales - algunos son elegidos para destacar

se trata de una criatura de 500 gramos que apareció un día sin anunciar. no hizo ningún ruido sino me miraba con sus ojazos negros. no sabía que tenía carácter de león dentro suyo.