Astrobiology reports on a cross-disciplinary study that has found that the song of humpback whales has the same distinct mathematical structure as a human language:
… Read the rest “Whalesong is structured like a language.”Humpback whale song
SONG: “Migration Roads”. (available as .ogg here)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Based on LiveScience, 3 May 2024, “1st Americans came over in 4 different waves from Siberia,… Read the rest “SONG: Migration Roads”
LiveScience has a dramatic development in a field I don’t think I’d ever considered: Linguistic archaeology. A historical linguist from UC Berkeley has used a language model… Read the rest “Languages show four waves of migration into prehistoric North America.”
Scientific American looks at babble and finds it comprehensible, thanks to language researchers who have learned that nonsense sounds imply the same concepts to listeners with different… Read the rest “Made-up sounds convey meaning across cultures.”
National Geographic goes (or went – this article is from 2013) into the science of forensic linguists, using computers to analyze things like word choice and sentence length to determine… Read the rest “How forensic linguistics reveals who wrote what. (Or, why JK Rowling and Alexander Hamilton can’t stay anonymous.)”
The Conversation looks at a way that Fatemeh Torabi Asr, a computational linguistics researcher at Simon Fraser University, has devised to use computers to instantaneously identify … Read the rest “An algorithm to sniff out fake news, linguistically.”
Science News has a fricative breakthrough – biting off a bit of linguistic evolution that took place when we started growing our own food rather than hunting and gathering whatever… Read the rest “Farming gave our languages “f” and “v” – because it altered the way we bite.”
German researchers, as disclosed in Science Daily, have found a singularly creative language – a form of whistled Turkish that, unlike any other language on Earth, is not processed… Read the rest “Whistled language is right-brained.”
Nature has more on the math whizzes of the South Pacific:
… Read the rest “Polynesian polynomials? Islanders counted in binary.”Binary arithmetic, the basis of all virtually digital computation today, is usually said to have been invented at the start of the
I heard this on NPR, but it’s been doing the rounds lately – as all happy news should. Rather than mourning the death of yet another language, linguists are now celebrating the… Read the rest “New language being born in Australia”
SONG: “Spirit of the Words” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Based on Computer program roots out ancestors of modern… Read the rest “SONG: Spirit of the Words”
Nature reports on the algorithm researchers have devised to find (or recreate) the ancestors of modern languages:
… Read the rest ““Bituqen” is Proto-Polynesian for “star.” A computer figured that out.”Statistician Alexandre Bouchard-Côté of the University of British
Nature reveals that no matter what language you’re reading, your brain lights up the same way when you do it:
… Read the rest “Reading really is fundamental. Neurologically. (Or: A Good Book Is Universal.)”Previous studies have suggested that alphabetic writing systems (such
BBC reports on the linguists who have started puzzling out how to read and write in proto-Elamite:
… Read the rest “The oldest un-translated language is getting clearer.”“I think we are finally on the point of making a breakthrough,” says Jacob
New York Times reviews a new dictionary of a really old language:
… Read the rest “Demotic dictionary, for ancient expressions.”Demotic was one of the three scripts inscribed on the Rosetta stone, along with Greek and hieroglyphs, enabling European
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