understanding language

I think I'm well on my way to discovering how I can understand languages that I have never studied. While this feat has probably been performed by many others I am in no way a neurologist so what I'm saying here may not be 100 percent accurate. In my anthropology class I read an article entitled broca's area, wernicke's area, and other language processing areas in the brain, which can be found online. In this article it states "it is the left hemisphere that formulates and understands the meaning of words and sentences, while the right hemisphere interprets the emotional connotation of these words". The right hemisphere must be easy to train the more languages one learns. Thus the more languages one knows the easier it is to grasp the emotional connotation of languages one does not know. Therefore while the interpreter does not have the strength of the left hemisphere, as one isn't able to understand the meaning of words and sentences, one can still grasp the general gist of the conversation through the understanding of the right hemisphere.%

Anthropology

It's shocking to me that so few people understand what I mean when I say I am applying to get my PhD in anthropology. "Did you hear about the new anthropological finding?" "Yes, actually I did hear one today that was really interesting but which are you talking about?" "They found that Lucy isn't the closest primate to humans." "Oh, right." "You do know Lucy, don't you?" "Yes" but that's not what I'm going to be doing. "So what did you hear?" they ask me. "That Obama is finally recognizing the Lumbee Indians as an Indian tribe." "Oh, that's interesting, I used to know some Lumbees."

After saying I'm interested in architectural anthropology people said "So, what will you be doing, excavating buildings?" Yes, actually I will be. Just buildings. If they find anything else in the ground I will refuse to dig it up.

"Oh! I LOVE Anthropology!" (By this time I'm thinking to myself, really?) "I love finding old artifacts and would have loved to study Hebrew and dig for old relics!" Ah, yes, me too. Absolutely love digging. When I was 3 years old. The person then goes on to explain how they love finding all of these artifacts and bones and how they loved when their street was dug up because of all the things that were found that they got to see.

I feel some moral obligation to start my explanation off with "I'm going to be studying anthropology. It has four subfields of which archaeology is the most common, but I will be studying cultural anthropology." And then if they say anything about digging or excavating "Actually that's archaeology."

It reminds me of when I went off to India and my father warned me that I may have to start telling people I'm from Canada. What I ended up doing was going into an explanation of the fact that a lot of people in the US were not Bush supporters if I ran into people who were angry at Americans. I didn't run from them, I didn't ignore the fact that I'm an American. I didn't let them think whatever they wanted to think. I just tried to educate them. Now it's my job to do that again, educate people as to what an anthropologist could mean so that next time they don't assume that someone who is a physical anthropologist is going to be excavating or thinking an archeologist is going to be studying culture.