In memoriam, José Ángel Ezcurra, director of Triunfo magazine

In 1990 or 1991, when I was preparing my dissertation on Indice, press and censorship under the Franco-regime, I interviewed the former director of Triunfo, maybe the most unequivocal exponent of the opposition to the Franco-regime during its last two decades. José Ángel Ezcurra provided me with a wealth of data, not only memories about the history of his own magazine, but also insights into how censorship functioned and into social life in press circles in the 60s and 70s.

The website http://www.triunfodigital.es/ contains a large collection of Triunfo issues, as well as documents of interest for the history of this magazine. Jose Ángel Ezcurra tells his history of Triunfo in "Triunfo en su época" (269 pages, PDF-document).

José Ángel Ezcurra died on October 1, 2010 in Madrid (Obituary: http://www.elpais.com/articulo/cultura/Jose/Angel/Ezcurra/director/Triunfo/elpepucul/20101001elpepucul_5/Tes).

“Look out for that big ant just north of your foot.”

Does Your Language Shape How You Think? Interesting article by Guy Deutscher in the New York Times (summary of his forthcoming book Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages), discussing teories that relate language with ways of thinking.

Deutscher distantiates himself from the Whorf theory giving language absolute supremacy over thinking and quotes Roman Jakobson stating that “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” Gender difference is an example: while French and German oblige their speakers to explicitly distinguish male and female friends, English doesn't; but on the other hand it does not stop its speakers from making that distinction if they wish to do so. Research even hints at the possibility that linguistic gender distinctions determine emotional connotations: Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more “manly properties” like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant.

The most surprising examples relate to how languages refer to space: whereas most languages use both egocentric coordinates (left, right of where I am standing), and geographic directions (north, south, east, west), there are languages that only use the latter type of directions. Speakers of the aboriginal Australian Guugu Yimithirr will therefore say, for instance: “I left it on the southern edge of the western table,” or “Look out for that big ant just north of your foot.” Such references are a clear sign of a different awareness of space.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html.