The Grammar of Happiness (2012)
Gênero : Documentário
Runtime : 52M
Director : Michael O'Neill, Randall Wood
Sinopse
The Grammar Of Happiness follows the story of Daniel Everett among the extraordinary 'nonconvertible' Amazonian Pirah tribe, a group of indigenous hunter- gatherers whose culture and outlook on life has taken the world of linguistics by storm. As a young ambitious missionary three decades ago, Dan, a red-bearded towering American, decamped to the Amazon rain forest to save indigenous souls. His assignment was to translate the book of Mark into the tongue of the Pirah, a people whose puzzling speech seemed unrelated to any other on Earth. What he learned during his time with the Pirah led him to question the very foundations of his own deep beliefs. As a 'born again' atheist, Dan divorced his devout Christian wife and became estranged from his children. Having lost faith and family, his new life is dominated by the desire to leave behind his legacy. Everett's most controversial claim is that the Pirah language lacks 'recursion' - the ability to build an infinite number of sentences.
Quando seres interplanetários deixam marcas na Terra, a Dra. Louise Banks, uma linguista especialista no assunto, é procurada por militares para traduzir os sinais e desvendar se os alienígenas representam uma ameaça. No entanto, a resposta para todas as perguntas e mistérios coloca em risco a vida de Louise e a de toda a humanidade.
Linguist Indrek Park has been working with Native American languages for over ten years. The film sees him recording the language of the Mandan tribe, who live in the prairies of North Dakota, on the banks of the Missouri River. The job involves a lot of responsibility, and he is running out of time – his language guide, the 84-year-old Edwin Benson, is the last native speaker of Mandan.
Jovem de 13 anos é descoberta em Arcádia, subúrbio de Los Angeles, ainda usando fraldas. Ela quase não conseguia andar e não sabia falar. Mantida em cativeiro pelos pais e sem contato com outras pessoas por mais de 10 anos, a menina vivia trancada em seu quarto, amarrada a um penico e deixada à própria sorte.
David Thorpe é um escritor que não gosta da própria voz. Ele decide buscar ajuda profissional para mudá-la enquanto investiga a origem do jeito de falar estereotipado dos homossexuais e o preconceito com quem fala assim.
Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison), um intelectual e professor de fonética, aposta que conseguirá, no período máximo de seis meses, transformar Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn), uma simples florista de rua que não sabe falar direito, em uma dama. Mas a tarefa se mostra muito mais difícil do que tinha sido imaginada originalmente.
Esta é a história de Nim, o chimpanzé que, na década de 70, se transformou no foco de um experimento histórico que teve como objetivo demonstrar que um macaco pode aprender a se comunicar com a linguagem dos humanos se é criado e alimentado como uma criança.
A series of interviews featuring linguist, philosopher and activist Noam Chomsky done in hand-drawn animation.
A film about the noted American linguist/political dissident and his warning about corporate media's role in modern propaganda.
An in-depth look at the work and views of the man described as 'one of the greatest minds in human history'. He first emerged through his pioneering work in linguistics in the 1950s but later became a political activist and a critic of US foreign policy in Vietnam, its neo-liberal capitalism, and mainstream media. Consisting primarily of interviews with Chomsky and other writers, academics, philosophers, social commentators and broadcasters, this film explores the breadth, originality and importance of his work; and the alternative narratives he has advanced at some of the most critical periods in recent history.
"Shaman" was filmed on July the 16th, 1977 in the northernmost corner of Eurasia, on the Taymyr Peninsula, at the Avam river, concurrently with the shooting of the documentary "The Winds of the Milky Way". The Nganasan Shaman Demnime (1913-1980) was 64 years old at the time. The documentary about Demnime's incarnation ritual was completed 20 years later. The fifth and final documentary in Lennart Meri's "Encyclopaedia Cinematographica Gentium Fenno - Uricarum" series.
Marc Okrand discusses his involvement with the Star Trek franchise and his work on inventing the Klingon and Vulcan languages.
This apocalyptic linguistic comedy meditates on the relationship between language, meaning and social decay and is scripted from "double-speak" language found in a variety of media sources. Drawing its title from the Pentagon's term for crash, Involuntary Conversion evokes the hollowness and free-floating anxiety that characterizes late 20th century culture. In a voice that could belong to a hypnotist or a government spokesman, a disembodied speaker recounts a string of events whose common thread is a sense of impending disaster. The mood is suspended somewhere between nightmare and deadpan and is propelled by a narrative as enigmatic as the language it exposes. The iconic shape of a fighter jet floating in a perfect sky has the creepy feel of a video game and the texture of television is used to make the images feel domestically ingrained.
CodeSwitching is a mash-up of personal stories from three generations of African American students who participated in a landmark voluntary desegregation program. Shuttling between their inner-city Boston neighborhoods and predominantly white suburban schools in pursuit of a better education, they find themselves swapping elements of culture, language, and behavior to fit in with their suburban counterparts – Often acting or speaking differently based on their surroundings, called code-switching.
The collaboration between the Tanacross and Northway, Alaska communities and trained linguistic specialists from the Alaska Native Language Center to keep their native language from disappearing. And the continuation of the tangential community effort of preserving their language and culture by teaching and using them at home and in schools and in their lives.
