Browsed by
Category: Language

If we can learn to speak the language of whales, what should we say?

If we can learn to speak the language of whales, what should we say?

Ross Andersen writes: One night last winter, over drinks in downtown Los Angeles, the biologist David Gruber told me that human beings might someday talk to sperm whales. In 2020, Gruber founded Project CETI with some of the world’s leading artificial-intelligence researchers, and they have so far raised $33 million for a high-tech effort to learn the whales’ language. Gruber said that they hope to record billions of the animals’ clicking sounds with floating hydrophones, and then to decipher the…

Read More Read More

A new look at our linguistic roots

A new look at our linguistic roots

Kurt Kleiner writes: Almost half of all people in the world today speak an Indo-European language, one whose origins go back thousands of years to a single mother tongue. Languages as different as English, Russian, Hindustani, Latin and Sanskrit can all be traced back to this ancestral language. Over the last couple of hundred years, linguists have figured out a lot about that first Indo-European language, including many of the words it used and some of the grammatical rules that…

Read More Read More

Language is at the heart of indigenous community health

Language is at the heart of indigenous community health

Erica X Eisen writes: Roughly 250 kilometres northeast of Alice Springs in Australia’s Northern Territory is a place called Utopia. Composed of a loose collection of sparsely populated clan sites in the inland desert, the area is the traditional homeland of the Alyawarr and Anmatyerr peoples, roughly 500 of whom still live in Utopia today. The area wasn’t settled by white colonisers until the 1920s, when a group of German pastoralists – ‘demented by the ferocity of the heat and…

Read More Read More

Borges and Heisenberg converged on the slipperiness of language

Borges and Heisenberg converged on the slipperiness of language

William Egginton writes: [A]s war raged around him, and as he worked to produce (or to hinder the production of, we may never know for sure) an atomic weapon for Germany, [Werner] Heisenberg was secretly working on a philosophical book. The ‘Manuscript of 1942’ would be named not for the year it was published, which wouldn’t be until long after his death, but for the year he finished and circulated it among close friends. From that work, it would seem…

Read More Read More

What Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán understand about your brain

What Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán understand about your brain

Marcel Danesi writes: Why do people believe some politicians’ lies even when they have been proven false? And why do so many of the same people peddle conspiracy theories? Lying and conspiratorial thinking might seem to be two different problems, but they turn out to be related. I study political rhetoric and have tried to understand how populist politicians use language to develop a cult-like following, divide nations, create culture wars and instill hatred. This pattern goes back to antiquity…

Read More Read More

What’s the world’s oldest language?

What’s the world’s oldest language?

Lucy Tu writes: The globe hums with thousands of languages. But when did humans first lay out a structured system to communicate, one that was distinct to a particular area? Scientists are aware of more than 7,100 languages in use today. Nearly 40 percent of them are considered endangered, meaning they have a declining number of speakers and are at risk of dying out. Some languages are spoken by fewer than 1,000 people, while more than half of the world’s…

Read More Read More

Wild parrot chicks babble like human infants

Wild parrot chicks babble like human infants

Science reports: Babies don’t babble to sound cute—they’re taking their first steps on the path to learning language. Now, a study shows parrot chicks do the same. Although the behavior has been seen in songbirds and two mammalian species, finding it in these birds is important, experts say, as they may provide the best nonhuman model for studying how we begin to learn language. The find is “exciting,” says Irene Pepperberg, a comparative psychologist at Hunter College not involved with…

Read More Read More

Some neural networks learn language like humans

Some neural networks learn language like humans

Steve Nadis writes: How do brains learn? It’s a mystery, one that applies both to the spongy organs in our skulls and to their digital counterparts in our machines. Even though artificial neural networks (ANNs) are built from elaborate webs of artificial neurons, ostensibly mimicking the way our brains process information, we don’t know if they process input in similar ways. “There’s been a long-standing debate as to whether neural networks learn in the same way that humans do,” said…

Read More Read More

Your brain wires itself to match your native language

Your brain wires itself to match your native language

Science News reports: The language we learn growing up seems to leave a lasting, biological imprint on our brains. German and Arabic native speakers have different connection strengths in specific parts of the brain’s language circuit, researchers report February 19 in NeuroImage, hinting that the cognitive demands of our native languages physically shape the brain. The new study, based on nearly 100 brain scans, is one of the first in which scientists have identified these kinds of structural wiring differences…

Read More Read More

The ChatGPT debate: Are we intelligent enough to understand ‘intelligence’?

The ChatGPT debate: Are we intelligent enough to understand ‘intelligence’?

Gabriel A. Silva writes: In the 2016 science fiction drama Arrival about first contact with aliens, the movie’s two protagonists, a linguist and a physicist, meet in a military helicopter on their way to attempt to decipher and understand why the aliens came to earth and what they want. The physicist, Ian Donnelly, introduces himself to the linguist, Louise Banks, by quoting from a book she published: ‘Language is the cornerstone of civilization. It is the glue that holds a…

Read More Read More

Why cursing is a healthy feature of human behavior

Why cursing is a healthy feature of human behavior

Alex Orlando writes: Well, damn. Maybe you stubbed your toe first thing in the morning. Or some thoughtless commuter forced you to slam the brakes on the drive to work. Perhaps you’re just fed up with it all and feel like sinking to your knees and cursing the heavens. If you’ve ever suppressed the urge to unleash a string of obscenities, maybe think again. Some research suggests that it might be a better idea to simply let the filth fly….

Read More Read More

The unpredictable abilities emerging from large AI models

The unpredictable abilities emerging from large AI models

Stephen Ornes writes: What movie do these emojis describe? That prompt was one of 204 tasks chosen last year to test the ability of various large language models (LLMs) — the computational engines behind AI chatbots such as ChatGPT. The simplest LLMs produced surreal responses. “The movie is a movie about a man who is a man who is a man,” one began. Medium-complexity models came closer, guessing The Emoji Movie. But the most complex model nailed it in one guess: Finding Nemo….

Read More Read More

Unlocking secrets of the honeybee dance language – bees learn and culturally transmit their communication skills

Unlocking secrets of the honeybee dance language – bees learn and culturally transmit their communication skills

A honeybee is performing the waggle dance in the center of this photo to communicate the location of a rich nectar source to its nestmates. Heather Broccard-Bell, CC BY-ND By James C. Nieh, University of California, San Diego The Greek historian Herodotus reported over 2,000 years ago on a misguided forbidden experiment in which two children were prevented from hearing human speech so that a king could discover the true, unlearned language of human beings. Scientists now know that human…

Read More Read More

British place names resonate with the song of missing birds

British place names resonate with the song of missing birds

Michael J Warren writes: In one of the oldest poems in English literature, there is a beautiful moment when a lone sailor, battling against stormy winter seas and his troubled soul, describes how birds have replaced human company for him on the ‘ice-cold way’ – an admission that carries both comfort and sardonic misery. His entertainment is the ‘swan’s song’, men’s laughter is now ‘the gannet’s sound and curlew’s cry’, and the warming tonic of mead is echoed in the…

Read More Read More

Finding language in the brain

Finding language in the brain

Giosuè Baggio writes: What exactly is language? At first thought, it’s a continuous flow of sounds we hear, sounds we make, scribbles on paper or on a screen, movements of our hands, and expressions on our faces. But if we pause for a moment, we find that behind this rich experiential display is something different: the smaller and larger building blocks of a Lego-like game of construction, with parts of words, words, phrases, sentences, and larger structures still. We can…

Read More Read More

The weird way language affects our sense of time and space

The weird way language affects our sense of time and space

Miriam Frankel and Matt Warren write: If you were asked to walk diagonally across a field, would you know what to do? Or what if you were offered £20 ($23) today or double that amount in a month, would you be willing to wait? And how would you line up 10 photos of your parents if you were instructed to sort them in chronological order? Would you place them horizontally or vertically? In which direction would the timeline move? These…

Read More Read More