Language log. All things linguistic. Indigenous tap new app to save old languages - Features. Concerned about the disappearance of indigenous languages, activist Pena Elliott thinks a new texting app could be the modern solution to preserving his native Saanich language.
"This new chat [software] is going to help our more fluent speakers a lot, because we're able to type it in, we're able to think in the language," says Elliott. “It helps you memorise it a lot more if you use it every day.” FirstVoices Chat, an app created for texting in native languages, was developed by an indigenous technology council on a Canadian native reserve in British Columbia. It is the first app to contain custom keyboards for every indigenous language of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, as well as Navajo - the largest indigenous language group in the US. Across Canada, there are at least 50 indigenous languages belonging to 11 language families. 'Many downloads' The new technology means traditional knowledge can be expressed and preserved in a modern way. Disappearing speaker bases Breaking the trend? WALS - The World Atlas of Language Structures.
Strong Lang. Linguistics: The magazine. « previous post | next post » A few years ago, as a half-serious ending for a talk that I gave at the LSA annual meeting ("The Future of Linguistics", 1/7/2007), I suggested that there might be some opportunities in the supermarket checkout line:
10 Tricks That Chatbots Use to Make You Believe They're Human. Digital Spell-Checking May Be Killing Off Words. The death rate of words has apparently increased recently while new entries into languages are becoming less common, both perhaps because of digital spell-checking, according to a Google-aided analysis of more than 10 million words.
More than 4 percent of the world's books have now been digitized, a trove that includes seven languages and dates back to the 16th century. All of this text offers new opportunities to study how language evolves. Researchers analyzed English, Spanish and Hebrew texts from 1800 to 2008 that had been digitized by Google. "We are now able to analyze language comprising not only the common words, but also the extremely rare words, and not just for yesterday but for yesteryear, and not just for yesteryear, but back to a time before most people can track their family lineage," said researcher Alexander Petersen, a physicist at the Institutions Markets Technologies Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies in Italy. Proto-Indo-European dictionary-translator. The Eclectorium: Indo-European Resources. The Eclectorium: Language links. New Nicaraguan sign language shows how language affects thought.
14 More Wonderful Words With No English Equivalent. Earlier this year, Bill DeMain introduced us to 15 Wonderful Words With No English Equivalent . Now that you've integrated those into your vocabulary, here are 14 more. 1. Shemomedjamo (Georgian) You know when you’re really full, but your meal is just so delicious, you can’t stop eating it?
The Georgians feel your pain. This word means, “I accidentally ate the whole thing. " 2. 9 Foreign Words the English Language Desperately Needs. As we have demonstrated before, the English language has some grievous holes in it.
We're talking about everyday phenomena that we have all noticed, yet don't have terms for. Fortunately, while we were busy fumbling with hand gestures and illustrations like cavemen, other cultures just made up the perfect words and phrases to encapsulate those little everyday moments filled with ... uh ... je ne sais quoi. #9.
Is Your Language Making You Broke and Fat? How Language Can Shape Thinking and Behavior (and How It Can’t) Julie Sedivy is the lead author of Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You And What This Says About You.
She contributes regularly to Psychology Today and Language Log. She is an adjunct professor at the University of Calgary, and can be found at juliesedivy.com and on Twitter/soldonlanguage. Keith Chen, an economist from Yale, makes a startling claim in an unpublished working paper: people’s fiscal responsibility and healthy lifestyle choices depend in part on the grammar of their language. Here’s the idea: Languages differ in the devices they offer to speakers who want to talk about the future. For some, like Spanish and Greek, you have to tack on a verb ending that explicitly marks future time—so, in Spanish, you would say escribo for the present tense (I write or I’m writing) and escribiré for the future tense (I will write). This cat uses sign language to ask for more noms. Language promotes false-belief understanding: ev... [Psychol Sci. 2009.
Alexander Gelbukh. Machine Translation Archive - home page. New Indo-European Language Discovered. A linguistics researcher at the Macquarie University in Australia has discovered that the language, known as Burushaski, which is spoken by about 90,000 people who reside in a remote area of Pakistan, is Indo-European in origin. 19th century photograph of a rajah and Burusho tribesmen from Hunza valley, Pakistan Prof Ilija Casule’s discovery, which has now been verified by a number of the world’s top linguists, has excited linguistics experts around the world.
An entire issue of the eminent international linguistics journal the Journal of Indo-European Studies is devoted to a discussion of his findings later this month. Saving dying languages with the help of math. Languages come and go and blend.
It's likely been that way forever and the process only accelerates under the influence of mega-languages (like English) that represent a sort of global means of communication. But, increasingly, people who are at risk of losing their native language entirely are fighting back—trying to encourage more people to be bilingual and save the native language from extinction. At Discover Magazine, Veronique Greenwood has a really interesting story about a mathematician who is helping to preserve Scottish Gaelic.
Proyecto Idiomas en peligro de extinción. UniversalJournal/AYJW - Articles, Papers, Essays - Association of Young Journalists and Writers. Printable Version By Emily Barnby One of the most appealing aspects of neurolinguistics is the limitless levels of comprehension that can be achieved. No matter how much researchers discover and understand, there is still centuries of development yet to be undertaken. The brain is the most complex of mechanisms, and its multiple levels, functions, and areas of specialization provide the mainframe of control for the basis of life itself: the human body and spirit.
First Language Acquisition : Acquisition in Extreme Circumstances. A : Introduction Last week we looked at two forms of evidence concerning the nature of language a) neurological evidence Language functions do appear to be localised in the brain, much as we would expect were Chomsky to be correct in his surmise that language is innate.
However, language functions appear to be distributed throughout the brain, and in normal use, the whole brain is brought into play. It is also important to recognise that although neurobiologists now know a lot about the brain, there is also a lot that is not known. The brain is an extremely complex organism. B. Computational Linguistics. Hen: Sweden’s new gender neutral pronoun causes controversy.
By most people’s standards, Sweden is a paradise for liberated women.
It has the highest proportion of working women in the world, and women earn about two-thirds of all degrees. Standard parental leave runs at 480 days, and 60 of those days are reserved exclusively for dads, causing some to credit the country with forging the way for a new kind of nurturing masculinity. In 2010, the World Economic Forum designated Sweden as the most gender-equal country in the world. But for many Swedes, gender equality is not enough. Will Sweden abolish the concept of gender? Funny, my husband keeps trying to talk me into moving to Sweden for all the nice things like proper, affordable healthcare and education.
But I don't speak Swedish and well, the climate is just not to my liking (especially that whole 20 hour day in summer and reverse in winter). The whole "affordable healthcare and education" thing needs to be deconstructed. Endangered Language: Native American Sign Speech. Canal de MITLINGUISTICS. How to organize a dictionary of made-up languages. Having studied translation, I can accept a Universal Translator as a necessary fictional device, and I am not against its use in fiction, but in reality a Universal Translator would be near-impossible to make.
First off, not every semantic unit is shared in every language- on Earth, when a language doesn't have something and notice it, it often borrows the word from another language. So between alien races, if an alien race has no concept of a particular thing, it would not have any linguistic way to express it. Second, the lexicon (total words) of a specific language is huge and constantly evolving.
The space necessary to stock all the information of every language, in every variety, for entire species, would be near infinite. Babies understand grammar long before they learn how to speak. My experience is that if I come across a new concept (in Russian or Norwegian), I have to deconstruct my own way of saying it, think of the logic while simutaneously not questioning the logic (or lack of), and learn to say it. After time, you accept it. Russian especially, for English speakers.
What started out some years ago as "Why and how the fuck do you say this? It cannot be done," changed over time to, "There's no other way to say it, and I can give reasons why. " There's a well-defined critical period for language acquisition early in life, when new neurons are actually being formed in the child's mind that are shaped by their linguistic experience. Linguistics. CLMS. Embodied Cognition
Embodied Cognition is a growing research program in cognitive science that emphasizes the formative role the environment plays in the development of cognitive processes. The general theory contends that cognitive processes develop when a tightly coupled system emerges from real-time, goal-directed interactions between organisms and their environment; the nature of these interactions influences the formation and further specifies the nature of the developing cognitive capacities. A Brief Guide to Embodied Cognition: Why You Are Not Your Brain. Embodied cognition, the idea that the mind is not only connected to the body but that the body influences the mind, is one of the more counter-intuitive ideas in cognitive science.
Phonetics: The Sounds of English and Spanish - The University of Iowa. Baby lab reveals surprisingly early gift of gab. Generative semantics. Praat: doing Phonetics by Computer. The International Phonetic Alphabet - Audio Illustrations. The Dictionary of Made-Up Languages: From Elvish to Klingon, The Anwa, Reella, Ealray, Yeht (Real) Origins of Invented Lexicons (9781440528170): Stephen D. Rogers. IPA character picker 11. Ishida >> apps. Noam Chomsky bibliography. Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler. The Secret Language of Vagabonds and Traveling Hobos. NONONONO Cat (ORIGINAL) Oh Long Johnson... - talking cat. Luis von Ahn: Massive-scale online collaboration. Talking Robot Mouth Mimics Human Speech #DigInfo. Alyssa talking backwards. Poteau Oklahoma. Cultural diffusion and the Whorfian hypothesis. « previous post | next post » Geoff Pullum summarizes Keith Chen's view of "The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior" as follows ("Keith Chen, Whorfian economist", 2/9/2012): Chen [...] thinks that if your language has clear grammatical future tense marking [...], then you and your fellow native speakers have a dramatically increased likelihood of exhibiting high rates of obesity, smoking, drinking, debt, and poor pension provision.
And conversely, if your language uses present-tense forms to express future time reference [...], you and your fellow speakers are strikingly more likely to have good financial planning for retirement and sensible health habits. Does the language you speak really affect how you see the future? In the World: Murmurs of Mayan.
Along with its stunningly accurate calendar and majestic pyramidal architecture, the Mayan civilization deserves recognition for another unique feature: its language. Localizing language in the brain. New research from MIT suggests that there are parts of our brain dedicated to language and only language, a finding that marks a major advance in the search for brain regions specialized for sophisticated mental functions. The advantage of ambiguity. The group that built the field. Unique languages, universal patterns. Libraries receive papers of distinguished linguist, philosopher and activist Noam Chomsky.
Infinity Imagined. ¿Qué idioma es el mejor para comunicarse? (I) Gendered Grammar Linked to Global Sexism. Young Goats Learn Accents From One Another. What Bilingual Babies Reveal About the Brain: Q&A with Psychologist Janet Werker. Q&A: Dead Languages Reveal a Lost World. Life's Extremes: Math vs. Language. Why the perfect language has to be both orderly and random. What did the world's first language sound like? 'Language Gene' Speeds Learning. Babies can understand what you're saying at just 6 months old. Phonemes probably can't reveal the ancient origins of language after all. Calculating the Language of Babel. Are birds’ tweets grammatical? Poop-Throwing Chimps Provide Hints of Human Origins.
Dolphins call each other by name - life - 07 September 2011. The secret life of pronouns - science-in-society - 07 September 2011. Baby apes' arm waving hints at origins of language - life - 10 November 2011. Chimp brains may be hard-wired to evolve language - life - 05 December 2011. Do thoughts have a language of their own? - opinion - 08 December 2011.