Alien Languages May Not Be Entirely Alien to Us. Human contact with alien civilizations may be more likely than we think.
A recent NASA study estimated that there should be at least four habitable planets (and probably more) within about 32 light years of Earth—a cosmic stone’s throw away. The Top 10 Most Spoken Languages Across the Globe. The Briefing As of March 15, 2021, COVID has claimed the lives of almost 2.7 million people worldwideThat’s 0.03% of the global populationWe’ll be updating this graphic as the current pandemic continues Visualizing the World’s Deadliest Pandemics Humanity has been battling against disease for centuries.
And while most contagious outbreaks have never reached full-blown pandemic status, there have been several times throughout history when a disease has caused mass devastation. Here’s a look at the world’s deadliest pandemics to date, viewed from the lens of the impact they had on the global population at the time. Ranked: The Countries with the Most Linguistic Diversity. The Briefing As of March 15, 2021, COVID has claimed the lives of almost 2.7 million people worldwideThat’s 0.03% of the global populationWe’ll be updating this graphic as the current pandemic continues Visualizing the World’s Deadliest Pandemics Humanity has been battling against disease for centuries.
‘Special and Beautiful’ Whistled Language Echoes Around This Island. LA GOMERA, Spain — Sitting atop a cliff in the Canary Islands, Antonio Márquez Navarro issued an invitation — “Come over here, we’re going to slaughter the pig” — without speaking a word: He whistled it.
In the distance, three visiting hikers stopped dead in their tracks at the piercing sound and its echo bouncing off the walls of the ravine that separated them. Mr. Márquez, 71, said that in his youth, when local shepherds rather than tourists walked the steep and rugged footpaths of his island, his news would have been greeted right away by a responding whistle, loud and clear. 25 Words That Are Their Own Opposites. Here’s an ambiguous sentence for you: “Because of the agency’s oversight, the corporation’s behavior was sanctioned.”
Does that mean, "Because the agency oversaw the company’s behavior, they imposed a penalty for some transgression," or does it mean, "Because the agency was inattentive, they overlooked the misbehavior and gave it their approval by default"? Chapter 1: Thinking Like a Linguist – Essentials of Linguistics. In this chapter, we begin to consider the ways that linguists think about language, especially the idea that linguists strive to make systematic observations of human language behaviour.
Linguists don’t spend time prescribing how people should or shouldn’t use their language! WALS Online - Origin, history and meaning of English words. Contact Languages Are Dying Out. When groups of people who speak different languages come together, they sometimes inadvertently create a new one, combining bits of each into something everyone can use to communicate easily.
Linguists call such impromptu tongues “contact languages” — and they can extend well beyond the pidgin and creole that many of us have heard of. The origin stories of these linguistic mash-ups vary. Some are peaceful, such as when groups meet for trade and need a lingua franca: Nigerian Pidgin English, for example, allows speakers of over 500 tongues to communicate. But others were born of tragedy and violence — like Haitian Creole, Gullah Geechee, Jamaican Creole and many others that arose from the Atlantic slave trade, when West African peoples combined several tongues with English, creating everyday languages often used among slaves.
'Invisible' words reveal common structure among famous stories. Aug. 7 (UPI) -- Storytelling requires a narrative arc, but the trajectory of a dramatic arc isn't always obvious.
By tracing the abundance of "invisible" words -- pronouns, articles and other short words -- researchers were able to identify patterns shared by a diversity of stories, from Shakespeare to Spielberg, according to a study published Friday in Science Advances. "Over the years, these 'invisible' words have been found to be related to a whole mess of psychological processes -- how people use small words like articles and pronouns tell us about a person's mental health, thinking style, their social status, and even how well they get along with other people," study lead author Ryan Boyd told UPI. "In many ways, it was a natural progression to look at what these words can tell us how the nature of stories," said Boyd, a lecturer in behavioral analytics at the University of Leeds.
During the third phase, cognitive tension is ramped up as the narrative arc reaches a climax. Language May Undermine Women in Science and Tech - Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. August 03, 2020 Despite decades of positive messaging to encourage women and girls to pursue education tracks and careers in STEM, women continue to fall far below their male counterparts in these fields.
A new study at Carnegie Mellon University examined 25 languages to explore the gender stereotypes in language that undermine efforts to support equality across STEM career paths. The results are available in the August 3rd issue of Nature Human Behavior. Molly Lewis, special faculty at CMU and her research partner, Gary Lupyan, associate professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, set out to examine the effect of language on career stereotypes by gender. They found that implicit gender associations are strongly predicted by the language we speak. “Young children have strong gender stereotypes as do older adults, and the question is where do these biases come from,” said Lewis, first author on the study. In general, the team examined how words co-occur with women compared to men. Were French People Born to Speak French? Linguistic anthropologists have observed that people all over the world perceive languages, and speakers of those different languages, as fundamentally different from one another.
When people listen to others’ speech, they hear discrete categorical boundaries even when differences in speech exist along a continuum. Our minds, and not just our ears, perceive these differences: we think of language X as being fundamentally different from language Y. Ipachart. Tutorials – Amy Reynolds. Langbrain - Language and Brain: Neurocognitive Linguistics. The world’s languages, in 7 maps and charts. A Gene May Help Discern Language Tone Differences: Is It Shí or Shì? More than 7,000 languages exist today, a wealth of diversity that continues to puzzle researchers. Languages vary in a number of ways: Parts of speech, for instance, may be ordered differently.
And a change in tone can signify a distinct word meaning. One lingering question that has perplexed linguists is whether genes predispose the use of tones or other linguistic features. A study published last month in Science Advances suggests subtle DNA differences influence a person’s ability to perceive tones. It provides the first tangible evidence for the potential impact of genes in the evolution of language. “For the first time, we found direct evidence that a genetic variant is actually tied to a linguistic feature,” says Patrick Wong, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and lead author of the paper. Wong and his colleagues are not the first to hypothesize that genetic diversity may drive the evolution of language. Should we all write in Chinese? Psychology - Academy 4SC.
Profanity. Speech Acts. Pragmatics. English Dialect. Language Acquisition. Universal Grammar. Gender. Tree Structure Diagrams. Bilingualism. Origins of Language. Language and Thought. Phonetics & Phonology. ConLang (Invented Languages) Writing Systems. Animals and Language. AI and Machine Learning. Morphology. Language Loss. Steven Pinker. Tools. How the Internet Is Changing Language as We Know It (ikr lol)
How Non-English Speakers Are Taught This Crazy English Grammar Rule You Know But Never Heard Of. English grammar, beloved by sticklers, is also feared by non-native speakers. Many of its idiosyncrasies can turn into traps even for the most confident users. But some of the most binding rules in English are things that native speakers know but don’t know they know, even though they use them every day. When someone points one out, it’s like a magical little shock. This week, for example, the BBC’s Matthew Anderson pointed out a ”rule” about the order in which adjectives have to be put in front of a noun.
The Unusual Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist. Why are some languages spoken faster than others? WERE THIS article written in Japanese, it would be longer. A Thai translation, meanwhile, would be shorter. And yet those reading it aloud, in either language or in its original English, would finish at roughly the same time. The Real Reason the Sound of Your Own Voice Makes You Cringe. What’s the Real Origin of “OK”? - Mental Floss - Pocket. Traditional masculinity may keep English-speaking men from studying new languages. For decades, more women have been entering male-dominated educational fields and careers.
The proportion of men in female-dominated areas, on the other hand, has remained mostly unchanged. Now, gender gaps in female-dominated undergraduate majors — like foreign language — are larger than gender gaps in biology, math or the physical sciences. Foreign language proficiency is a useful skill that can lead to job opportunities and potential cognitive benefits. But in countries where English is the majority language, boys and men tend to drop out of foreign language study as soon as it is not mandatory. Aliens, Neo-Confucians, and the Power of Language – Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University. Brain functions - Queensland Brain Institute - University of Queensland. Our Storytelling Minds: Do We Ever Really Know What's Going on Inside? Nobel Prize winning neuropsychologist Roger Sperry. Image Credit: Wikipedia. Theconversation.
A new study on second language learning has recently taken the media by storm. Uri Hasson: This is your brain on communication. A Map of Lexical Distances Between Europe's Languages. Half of All Languages Come from One Root Language. How it Spread Is Something of Debate. Atlasobscura. "Original pronunciation' Brings New Life to Shakespeare. Last week, an intriguing video on Shakespeare became a mini viral hit. American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Supporting the Study of World Languages and Computer Science. Localingual: listen to the voices of the world. A Look Back: “Oh, Boy, This Is Great! Researcher’s Scans Show Brain Connections Growing When Learning New Language”
One of the most difficult words to translate... - Krystian Aparta. NativLang. Time travelling to the mother tongue. How interpreters juggle two languages at once - Ewandro Magalhaes. The Human Brain as a Word Cloud, on a Shared Drive. Words We Invented By Getting Them Wrong. Does grammar matter? - Andreea S. Calude. Jolly Roger Telephone Company Uses Software To Entrap Telemarketers. The Story of the Umlaut.
Could There Soon Be A Global Language? European word translator: an interactive map. Why Do Animals Make Different Sounds in Different Languages? How computers translate human language - Ioannis Papachimonas. When People Talk Backwards. Speech perception without traditional speech cues. Language. In China's Cyberspace, a Code for Criticism.
How Dare You Say That! The Evolution of Profanity. The Best “Language Maps” 22 Maps That Show The Deepest Linguistic Conflicts In America. If You Don't Have Anything Nice to Say, SAY IT IN ALL CAPS. 'Vocal Fry' Creeping Into U.S. Speech. VIDEO: Talking While Female. Horizon Information Portal. Readings and Other Materials. On learning languages and the gaining of wisdom - Language on the Move. Lindsay Morcom: A history of Indigenous languages. How many verb tenses are there in English? - Anna Ananichuk. Animated map shows how the world's first written languages spread.