Nova Languages

The spread of the Proto-Indo-European word for "wolf."

According to a machine learning analysis of dozens of #languages conducted at Princeton University, the meaning of #words does not necessarily refer to an intrinsic, essential constant. Instead, it is significantly shaped by culture, history and geography. This finding held true even for some concepts that would seem to be universal, such as emotions, landscape features and body parts.

Linguists discover 30 sounds that may have allowed communication before words existed.

This is the history of how Shakespeare was #translated into Tibetan.

Picking up a new #language at any age creates new pathways that could also make you a better person and may even help stave off dementia.

From Lutherans to Nazis, linguistic authorities have long sought to understand and control Rotwelsch (and long cast aspersions at its many Yiddish loan words).

Chinook Wawa was once spoken by more than 100,000 people, from Alaska to the California border, for more than 100 years.

Humans are born with a part of the brain that is prewired to be receptive to seeing words and letters, setting the stage at birth for people to learn how to read, a new study suggests.

The country that introduced the world to hygge now has another term for us: samfundssind.

The word lox was one of the clues that eventually led linguists to discover who the Proto-Indo-Europeans were, and where they lived.

The capacity for #language is built upon our ability to understand combinations of words and the relationships between them, but the evolutionary history of this ability is little understood. Now, researchers from the University of Warwick have managed to date this capacity to at least 30-40 million years ago, the last common ancestor of monkeys, apes and humans.

Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory recently developed a new system that has been shown to be able to automatically decipher a lost #language, without needing advanced knowledge of its relation to other languages.

Community activists are using creative methods to revive #endangered #languages and reawaken dormant ones.

Chinese readers are often buying entirely different books to international readers of Chinese fiction what's going on?

What Is a ‘Kill’ and Why Does New York Have So Many of Them?

Dr. Daniel Mansfield and his team at the University of New South Wales in Australia have just made an incredible discovery. While studying a 3,700-year-old tablet from the ancient civilization of Babylon, they found evidence that the Babylonians were doing something astounding: trigonometry!

The Amazing Ways Duolingo Is Using Artificial Intelligence To Deliver Free Language Learning.

What do we mean by the word beautiful? It depends not only on whom you ask, but in what #language you ask them. According to a #machine #learning analysis of dozens of languages conducted at Princeton University, the meaning of words does not necessarily refer to an intrinsic, essential constant. Instead, it is significantly shaped by culture, history and geography. This finding held true even for some concepts that would seem to be universal, such as emotions, landscape features and body parts.

Researchers at UCLA have developed a #translation glove which can translate finger movements to one of more than 600 signs with a remarkable 98.63% accuracy. #SignLanguage