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Category: Language

Chimp sounds trigger a strange brain signal in humans

Chimp sounds trigger a strange brain signal in humans

SciTechDaily reports: The human brain is not limited to recognizing speech from other people. Researchers at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) have found that specific parts of the auditory cortex react strongly to the vocalizations of chimpanzees. These primates are our closest relatives both in evolutionary terms and in the acoustic qualities of their calls. The study, published in the journal eLife, points to the presence of specialized subregions in the human brain that are particularly responsive to the sounds…

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Aphoristic intelligence beats artificial intelligence

Aphoristic intelligence beats artificial intelligence

James Geary writes: The first aphorism I ever read was on the Quotable Quotes page of Reader’s Digest, one of only two publications available in my house growing up. (The other was Time magazine.) I must have been about 8 years old when I came across the following sentence by Gerald Burrill, then the Episcopal bishop of Chicago: The difference between a rut and a grave is the depth. At the time, I had no idea what an aphorism was….

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‘Who controls the present controls the past’: What Orwell’s ‘1984’ explains about the twisting of history to control the public

‘Who controls the present controls the past’: What Orwell’s ‘1984’ explains about the twisting of history to control the public

George Orwell’s ‘1984’ has some lessons for 2025. NurPhoto/Corbis via Getty Images By Laura Beers, American University When people use the term “Orwellian,” it’s not a good sign. It usually characterizes an action, an individual or a society that is suppressing freedom, particularly the freedom of expression. It can also describe something perverted by tyrannical power. It’s a term used primarily to describe the present, but whose implications inevitably connect to both the future and the past. In his second…

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Chimpanzees’ rhythmic drumming and complex calls hint at origins of human language

Chimpanzees’ rhythmic drumming and complex calls hint at origins of human language

  NPR reports: Researchers have found two important building blocks of human speech in wild chimpanzees, one of our closest relatives. A pair of studies finds that chimp communication includes both rhythmic structures and call combinations, two key elements of spoken language. Taken together, the studies add to an emerging “early footprint” indicating how human language may have evolved, says Catherine Crockford, an author of one of the studies and a research director at the French National Centre for Scientific…

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How the right created its own draconian version of woke

How the right created its own draconian version of woke

Thomas Chatterton Williams writes: One of the defining features of the social-justice orthodoxy that swept through American culture between roughly the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 to Hamas’s assault on Israel in 2023 was the policing of language. Many advocates became obsessed with enforcing syntactical etiquette and banishing certain words. “Wokeness,” as it’s known, introduced the asymmetrical capitalization of the letter b in Black but not the w in white. It forced Romance languages like Spanish to submit to gender-neutral constructions such as Latinx. It called for…

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A word that hasn’t changed in sound or meaning in 8,000 years

A word that hasn’t changed in sound or meaning in 8,000 years

Sevindj Nurkiyazova writes: One of my favorite words is lox,” says Gregory Guy, a professor of linguistics at New York University. There is hardly a more quintessential New York food than a lox bagel—a century-old popular appetizing store, Russ & Daughters, calls it “The Classic.” But Guy, who has lived in the city for the past 17 years, is passionate about lox for a different reason. “The pronunciation in the Proto-Indo-European was probably ‘lox,’ and that’s exactly how it is pronounced in…

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Large language models may face a hard limit to their abilities

Large language models may face a hard limit to their abilities

Anil Ananthaswamy writes: On December 17, 1962, Life International published a logic puzzle consisting of 15 sentences describing five houses on a street. Each sentence was a clue, such as “The Englishman lives in the red house” or “Milk is drunk in the middle house.” Each house was a different color, with inhabitants of different nationalities, who owned different pets, and so on. The story’s headline asked: “Who Owns the Zebra?” Problems like this one have proved to be a…

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Hannah Arendt’s love of the word

Hannah Arendt’s love of the word

Daegan Miller writes: “What is the subject of our thought? Experience! Nothing else! And if we lose the ground of experience then we get into all kinds of theories.” — Hannah Arendt Hannah Arendt first fled the Nazis in 1933. It was a harrowing escape: she had just been released from the Gestapo prison in Berlin after eight days of interrogation for collecting evidence of German anti-Semitism from the stacks of the Prussian State Library. She knew she had little…

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Large Language Models don’t actually model human language

Large Language Models don’t actually model human language

The Register reports: In May, Sam Altman, CEO of $80-billion-or-so OpenAI, seemed unconcerned about how much it would cost to achieve the company’s stated goal. “Whether we burn $500 million a year or $5 billion – or $50 billion a year – I don’t care,” he told students at Stanford University. “As long as we can figure out a way to pay the bills, we’re making artificial general intelligence. It’s going to be expensive.” Statements like this have become commonplace…

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How much does language shape thought?

How much does language shape thought?

Manvir Singh writes: Everyone can agree that language affects thought. If I told you that I have a pet badger and twenty-two canaries, you’d have new thoughts about my home life. The real question is whether a language itself has features that affect how its speakers think: Does conversing in Spanish for a month make objects seem more gendered? Does speaking English rather than Hindi make you less casteist, and maybe more capitalist? Today, questions like these tend to be…

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The race to translate animal communication into human language

The race to translate animal communication into human language

Arik Kershenbaum writes: In 2025 we will see AI and machine learning leveraged to make real progress in understanding animal communication, answering a question that has puzzled humans as long as we have existed: “What are animals saying to each other?” The recent Coller-Dolittle Prize, offering cash prizes up to half-a-million dollars for scientists who “crack the code” is an indication of a bullish confidence that recent technological developments in machine learning and large language models (LLMs) are placing this…

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How primate eye tracking reveals new insights into the evolution of language

How primate eye tracking reveals new insights into the evolution of language

Mariya Surmacheva/Shutterstock By Vanessa Wilson, University of Hull The human environment is a very social one. Family, friends, colleagues, strangers – they all provide a continuous stream of information that we need to track and make sense of. Who is dating whom? Who is in a fight with whom? While our capacity for dealing with such a large social network is impressive, it’s not something especially unique to humans. Other primates do it too. We – humans and other primates…

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Project analyzing human language usage shuts down because ‘generative AI has polluted the data’

Project analyzing human language usage shuts down because ‘generative AI has polluted the data’

Robyn Speer, the creator of wordfreq, writes: The wordfreq data is a snapshot of language that could be found in various online sources up through 2021. There are several reasons why it will not be updated anymore. Generative AI has polluted the data I don’t think anyone has reliable information about post-2021 language usage by humans. The open Web (via OSCAR) was one of wordfreq’s data sources. Now the Web at large is full of slop generated by large language…

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Linguistic relativity holds that your worldview is structured by the language you speak. Is it true?

Linguistic relativity holds that your worldview is structured by the language you speak. Is it true?

James McElvenny writes: Anyone who has learned a second language will have made an exhilarating (and yet somehow unsettling) discovery: there is never a one-to-one correspondence in meaning between the words and phrases of one language and another. Even the most banal expressions have a slightly different sense, issuing from a network of attitudes and ideas unique to each language. Switching between languages, we may feel as if we are stepping from one world into another. Each language seemingly compels…

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How fetuses learn to talk while they’re still in the womb

How fetuses learn to talk while they’re still in the womb

Darshana Narayanan writes: Loud, shrill and penetrating – a baby’s cry is its first act of communication. A simple adaptation that makes it less likely that the baby’s needs will be overlooked. And babies aren’t just crying for attention. While crying, they are practising the melodies of speech. In fact, newborns cry in the accent of their mother tongue. They make vowel-like sounds, growl and squeal – these are protophones, sounds that eventually turn into speech. Babies communicate as soon…

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Ultra-detailed brain map shows neurons that encode the meaning of words

Ultra-detailed brain map shows neurons that encode the meaning of words

Nature reports: By eavesdropping on the brains of living people, scientists have created the highest-resolution map yet of the neurons that encode the meanings of various words. The results hint that, across individuals, the brain uses the same standard categories to classify words — helping us to turn sound into sense. The study is based on words only in English. But it’s a step along the way to working out how the brain stores words in its language library, says…

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