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Category: Language

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…

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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…

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‘Phenomenal’ ancient DNA data set provides clues to origin of farming and early languages

‘Phenomenal’ ancient DNA data set provides clues to origin of farming and early languages

Science reports: Few places have shaped Eurasian history as much as the ancient Near East. Agriculture and some of the world’s first civilizations were born there, and the region was home to ancient Greeks, Troy, and large swaths of the Roman Empire. “It’s absolutely central, and a lot of us work on it for precisely that reason,” says German Archaeological Institute archaeologist Svend Hansen. “It’s always been a bridge of cultures and a key driver of innovation and change.” But…

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We are moving into an era defined by homesickness

We are moving into an era defined by homesickness

Madeline Ostrander writes: From above, an open-cut coal mine looks like some geological aberration, a sort of man-made desert, a recent volcanic eruption, or a kind of terra forming. When the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht first gazed at a series of such mines while driving through his home region in southeast Australia, he stopped and got out of his car, overcome “at the desolation of this once beautiful place,” he wrote in his book, Earth Emotions. As a scholar, Albrecht…

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Eastern Ukrainians reject their Russian birth language

Eastern Ukrainians reject their Russian birth language

The Observer reports: Gamlet Zinkivskyi grew up speaking Russian in the city of Kharkiv, just like his parents. But when Vladimir Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, it was the final push for him to switch fully to Ukrainian. “Unfortunately, I grew up speaking Russian, but it’s not pleasant to speak the same language as the army that is destroying whole areas of our country,” said Zinkivskyi, a 35-year-old street artist widely known to Kharkiv residents, who…

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Chimpanzees combine calls to form numerous vocal sequences

Chimpanzees combine calls to form numerous vocal sequences

Science Daily reports: Humans are the only species on earth known to use language. We do this by combining sounds to form words and words to form hierarchically structured sentences. The question, where this extraordinary capacity originates from, still remains to be answered. In order to retrace the evolutionary origins of human language, researchers often use a comparative approach — they compare the vocal production of other animals, in particular of primates, to those of humans. In contrast to humans,…

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What the Vai script reveals about the evolution of writing

What the Vai script reveals about the evolution of writing

Piers Kelly writes: In a small West African village, a man named Momolu Duwalu Bukele had a compelling dream. A stranger approached him with a sacred book and then taught him how to write by tracing a stick on the ground. “Look!” said the spectral visitor. “These signs stand for sounds and meanings in your language.” Bukele, who had never learned to read or write, found that after waking he could no longer recall the precise signs the stranger revealed…

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In a creative play on three different languages, Ukrainians identify an enemy: ‘ruscism’

In a creative play on three different languages, Ukrainians identify an enemy: ‘ruscism’

Timothy Snyder writes: The City Council of Mariupol, Ukraine, was trying to make a point about mass death. Their city had been hit hardest by the Russian invasion, and thousands of corpses lay amid the rubble after weeks of urban warfare. After the revelation of Russian atrocities in Bucha and other cities in northern Ukraine, the elected representatives of the port city wished to remind the world that the scale of killing in the south was still higher. In dry…

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Mushrooms communicate with each other using up to 50 ‘words’, scientist claims

Mushrooms communicate with each other using up to 50 ‘words’, scientist claims

The Guardian reports: Buried in forest litter or sprouting from trees, fungi might give the impression of being silent and relatively self-contained organisms, but a new study suggests they may be champignon communicators. Mathematical analysis of the electrical signals fungi seemingly send to one another has identified patterns that bear a striking structural similarity to human speech. Previous research has suggested that fungi conduct electrical impulses through long, underground filamentous structures called hyphae – similar to how nerve cells transmit…

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How to pronounce and spell ‘Kyiv’, and why it matters

How to pronounce and spell ‘Kyiv’, and why it matters

The Guardian reports: Kiev or Kyiv? As Russian forces menace the Ukrainian capital and thousands flee, the very least onlookers around the world can do is learn how to say the name of the city under siege. The short answer is simple: Ukrainians call their capital “Kyiv” (kee-yiv), the spelling, a transliteration of the Ukrainian Київ. The Russian version is “Kiev” (kee-yev). The latter, based on transliteration from the Russian cyrillic Киев, became the internationally accepted name through the Soviet…

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Some parallels between birdsong and human speech

Some parallels between birdsong and human speech

Betsy Mason writes: In our quest to find what makes humans unique, we often compare ourselves with our closest relatives: the great apes. But when it comes to understanding the quintessentially human capacity for language, scientists are finding that the most tantalizing clues lay farther afield. Human language is made possible by an impressive aptitude for vocal learning. Infants hear sounds and words, form memories of them, and later try to produce those sounds, improving as they grow up. Most…

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Rare, isolated script invented from scratch holds clues to the evolution of writing

Rare, isolated script invented from scratch holds clues to the evolution of writing

Science Alert reports: A rare script from a language in Liberia has provided some new insights into how written languages evolve. “The Vai script of Liberia was created from scratch in about 1834 by eight completely illiterate men who wrote in ink made from crushed berries,” says linguistic anthropologist Piers Kelly, now at the University of New England, Australia. “Because of its isolation, and the way it has continued to develop up until the present day, we thought it might…

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The therapeutic value of swearing

The therapeutic value of swearing

Stephen Tuffin writes: When I was a kid, swearing was taboo – except for that one time when my dad, a hulking great navvy of a man, took me down the yard where they kept all the equipment road workers used out on the roads, and I witnessed the cutting down of a tree. An elm, I am reliably told. At home, that evening, sat on the kitchen table of our council house, my mum scrubbing my hands and face,…

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The brain processes speech in parallel with other sounds

The brain processes speech in parallel with other sounds

Jordana Cepelewicz writes: Hearing is so effortless for most of us that it’s often difficult to comprehend how much information the brain’s auditory system needs to process and disentangle. It has to take incoming sounds and transform them into the acoustic objects that we perceive: a friend’s voice, a dog barking, the pitter-patter of rain. It has to extricate relevant sounds from background noise. It has to determine that a word spoken by two different people has the same linguistic…

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Being Persian before nationalism

Being Persian before nationalism

Mana Kia writes: At the end of the 19th century, under the looming shadow of European colonial encroachment, political and intellectual elites in Iran began to draw on nationalist forms of belonging as a way to unify the various ethnic and religious groups that lived within its territory. The nation was gaining ground at this time as the acceptable and legible idiom of collective political demands. As in most of Africa and Asia, nationalism was anticolonial, understood as a liberatory…

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Sunlight affects whether languages have a word for ‘blue’

Sunlight affects whether languages have a word for ‘blue’

Cathleen O’Grady writes: Color is a spectrum: Red fades from orange to yellow, whereas green merges to turquoise, then blue. Languages treat this spectrum in different ways: Some have separate words for “green” and “blue,” others lump the two together. Some barely bother with color terms at all. “The question is, why?” says Dan Dediu, an evolutionary linguist at Lumière University Lyon 2. Now, he and his colleagues have found evidence for an unexpected answer: People with more exposure to…

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