Sprognyheder

Vi mennesker kan kun forstå verden omkring os, fordi vi bliver hjulpet af en masse strukturer – blandt andet sproget. Det mener strukturalisterne.

 Last week in an EU:Sci podcast, Christos Christodoulopoulos challenged me to find a correlation between the basic word order of the language people use and the number of children they have.  This was off the back of a number of spurious correlations with which readers of Replicated Typo will be familiar.  Here are the results! First, I do a straightforward test of whether word order is correlated with the number of children you have.  This comes out as significant!  I wonder if  having more children hanging around affects the adaptive pressures on langauge?  However, I then show that this result is undermined by discovering that there are other linguistic variables that are even better predictors. I used the World Values Survey:  a large database of survey results from thousands of people around the world, including what language they speak and how many children they have.  I then linked this up with linguistic typology data from the World Atlas of [...]

Gyani Maiya Sen, a 75-year-old woman from western Nepal, can perhaps be forgiven for feeling that the weight of the world rests on her shoulders. She is the only person still alive in Nepal who fluently speaks the Kusunda language. The unknown origins and mysterious sentence structures of Kusunda have long baffled linguists.

Han optræder mange steder for tiden: The Guardian, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Nature – for blot at nævne nogle, men fredag stod den amerikanske lingvist Daniel Everett foran et nysgerrigt og spørgelystent publikum på Aarhus Universitet.han talte om Amazonesprog Pirahã. Sproget adskiller sig mest afgørende ved, at det er et ikke-rekursivt sprog. Rekursion er muligheden for at lave blandt andet ledsætninger, hvilket ellers regnes for et universelt træk ved alle sprog, men Everett´s påstand er, at der ikke findes underordnede led på Pirahã-sprog.

I eksperimentel fonetik bruger man indimellem en teknik der hedder palatografi til at udforske hvordan konsonanter artikuleres. Teknikken går ud på at smøre

Fredag 9. Maj, kl. 15.30, aarhus: film og forelæsning Daniel Everett er en berømt amerikansk lingvist, der i 30 år har forsket i et sydamerikansk indianersprog. Et lille, men levedygtigt sprog, der strider mod forestillingen om, hvad alle sprog har til fælles. På fredag holder han forelæsning om det utrolige sprog.

Nyt nordisk netværk vil indsamle viden om et nyt forskningsområde, nemlig sproget i de nye medier, som vi ikke ved ret meget om.

People of all ages and cultures gesture while speaking, some much more noticeably than others. But is gesturing uniquely tied to speech, or is it, rather, processed by the brain like any other manual action? Scientists have discovered that actual actions on objects, such as physically stirring a spoon in a cup, have less of an impact on the brain’s understanding of speech than simply gesturing as if stirring a spoon in a cup.

Lær språk, ta bedre avgjørelser Å beherske to språk gir deg fordeler, både i hviskeleken og på aksjemarkedet.

Vi får ikke en national strategi for fremmedsprog lige nu. Men Uddannelsesministeren mener dog, at regeringen er godt i gang med at skabe rammer, der giver mulighed for mere fremmedsprog og flere fremmedsprog.

Experience the widely acknowledged and controversial American anthropologist/linguist Daniel Everett. Everett will show a film about his life with the Pirahɑ̃-people in the Amazon: “The Grammar of Happiness”. And give a lecture on the language. Aarhus, May 11. Exclusive for Scandinavia

Hvis forskere indenfor de sprogteknologiske aspekter af kunstig intelligens skal tage ved lære af Wittgensteins voldsomme revidering af sin egen sprogforståelse, så må vi først og fremmest forkaste alle afarter af den logiske atomisme som stadig nyder stor indflydelse i dag. I stedet for at fokusere på de nederste niveauer af sproganalyse må svaret ligge i at starte ved det øverste niveau og arbejde sig nedad – ikke omvendt.

All names have an origin, although it is not always easy for researchers to agree on where the name first came into use, or what it actually means.

Some languages sound faster than others, but most convey information at the same rate

From the beginning of the 9th century AD through the 11th century AD, Vikings raided the coast of the British Isles. But there were also quite a number of Scandinavians who chose to settle there.

De tilstedeværende vil kunne tale over 40 forskellige sprog på samme tid. Anledningen er en konference på Aarhus Universitet om kreolsprog, som tiltrækker lingvister fra hele verden. man vil måske kunne høre nogle tale gurindji, sinhala og yoruba, når Aarhus Universitet er vært for en international sprogkonference.

I år er det 25 år siden, Alice Stevens døde. Hun var den sidste, der talte sproget ”negerhollandsk”. Et sprog, der på en særlig måde er knyttet til Danmark. ­­Blandt lingvister diskuterer man i øjeblikket, om kreolsprog adskiller sig fra ikke-kreolsprog. Har alle 70 kreolsprog, der findes i verden, noget til fælles, ud over de særlige omstændigheder omkring deres opståen, der adskiller dem fra de ca. 7000 andre sprog, der findes i verden?

Nye grene på træet - omtale af biografien ”Forsker, furie, frontkæmper. En bog om Lis Jacobsen." Gyldendal 2011. Af Kristian Hvidt.

Boken gir en presentasjon av hele det norske runematerialet. Det dreier seg om runeinnskrifter som går helt tilbake til de første århundrer e.Kr.

Konference om kreolsprog I år er det 25 år siden, Alice Stevens døde. Hun var den sidste, der talte sproget negerhollandsk. Et sprog, der på en særlig måde er knyttet til Danmark. Inden længe endda på dansk grund igen, når lingvister fra 28 lande mødes til en konference på Aarhus Universitet i denne måned.

Every verb ends with a suffix that tells you whether what you're saying was directly observed, or inferred, or just overheard by hearsay. So they don't talk about things that they haven't witnessed themselves, or that somebody they know hasn't witnessed. They don't have stories of the ancient past because that doesn't make any sense to them. You were never there. And they don't have stories about what's going to happen to them in the future

Will one researcher's discovery deep in the Amazon destroy the foundation of modern linguistics?

Pormpuraaw ist eine kleine Siedlung der Aborigines in Nordaustralien. Die amerikanische Psychologin Lera Boroditsky bittet ein fünf Jahre altes Mädchen, nach Norden zu zeigen. Ohne zu zögern deutet sie in die richtige Richtung. Später stellt Boroditsky dieselbe Aufgabe in den USA. In einem Hörsaal der Stanford University sitzen angesehene, mehrfach ausgezeichnete Gelehrte; manche besuchen seit 40 Jahren Vorträge diesen Raum. Wie sich zeigt, haben sie keine Ahnung, wo Norden liegt; sie verweigern ratlos die Antwort oder deuten in alle möglichen Richtungen

Have physicists, tapping Google's scanned books, discovered universal laws about language?

Language: The Cultural Tool by Daniel Everett – review. Native speakers of Pirahã, in the Amazon lowland jungle, have no words for left or right, they use the same term for blue and green, and their definitions of red, black and white turn out to be similes, rather than dedicated words.

Professor Everett discovered the Pirahã are the world’s only people who lack number words or any concept of counting. They also have no past tense, no way of describing colours or concept of the ancient past or distant future. Although their language has one of the smallest sets of vowels and consonants and one of the least complex grammars known among the world's 7000 languages, they can communicate by whistling, humming, and singing.

Rebecca Rosen, "The QWERTY Effect: The Keyboards Are Changing Our Language!", The Atlantic: It's long been thought that how a word sounds — it's very phonemes — can be related in some ways to what that word means. But language is no longer solely oral. Much of our word production happens not in our throats and mouths but on our keyboards. Could that process shape a word's meaning as well?

In both animals and humans, vocal signals used for communication contain a wide array of different sounds that are determined by the vibrational frequencies of vocal cords. Knowing how the brain sorts out these different frequencies - which are called frequency-modulated sweeps - is believed to be essential to understanding many hearing-related behaviors, like speech. Now, a pair of biologists has identified how and where the brain processes this type of sound signal.

Words spelled with more letters on the right of the keyboard are associated with more positive emotions than words spelled with more letters on the left, according to new research by cognitive scientists. Their work shows, for the first time, that there is a link between the meaning of words and the way they are typed -- a relationship they call the QWERTY effect.

Adolf Hitler knuselskede den – indtil han proklamerede, at den var ’jødisk’ og forbød den. Den gamle skrifttype ’frakturskrift’ har en lang og farverig historie bag sig. I dag er frakturskrift gået i glemmebogen.

Med multiple choice-opgaver, hvor der er 20 pct. sandsynlighed for at svare rigtigt, hvis man gætter fuldstændig tilfældigt, er det svært at lave opgaver, som kun de allerdygtigste elever kan svare rigtigt på. Dermed er der en grundlæggende præmis i de nationale test i læsning, der ikke fungerer.

Løgne fortælles i et særligt sprog. Det har psykologiprofessor James W. Pennebaker fundet ud af, ved at forske i tusindvis af løgne. Når vi lyver, har vi færre detaljer med, bruger et mere udtalt følelsessprog og har færre referencer til os selv.

We depend on a barrage of standardized tests to assess everything from aptitude to intelligence. But do they provide an accurate forecast when it comes to something as complex as language? A study by Diane Pesco, an assistant professor in Concordia's Department of Education, and co-author Daniela O'Neill, published earlier this year in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, shows that the Language Use Inventory (LUI) does.

Modern technology can save languages as well as destroy them. This is not a fate which appeals to K. David Harrison, of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. But Dr Harrison is an optimist. He believes information technology—something seen by many people as a threat to linguistic diversity—might actually turn out to be its saviour.

Fra det sene forår og hen over sommeren er Assistens Kirkegård på Nørrebro i København et af verdens særsyn. Den besøgende finder ingen stille og andægtig stemning; nej, mellem gravene tumler legende børn, der spilles bold, tages solbad og indtages medbragt mad, og massevis af cyklister tager den anlagte smutvej, der skærer kirkegården i to dele.

Scientists have long believed that human speech is processed towards the back of the brain's cerebral cortex, behind auditory cortex where all sounds are received -- a place famously known as Wernicke's area after the German neurologist who proposed this site in the late 1800s based on his study of brain injuries and strokes.

When a friend tells you she had a rough day, do you feel sandpaper under your fingers? The brain may be replaying sensory experiences to help understand common metaphors, new research suggests.

Where is speech perception in the brain? In 1881 Karl Wernicke described patients with lesions in the left temporal lobeand a problem in understanding spoken language. Since this discovery, people have commonly used“Wernicke’s area” as a term to describe the neural location of speechperception. The notion of what brains areas might comprise Wernicke’s area evolved over the next century, with a consensus emerging that Wernicke’s area,and thus speech perception, was associated with to the left posterior superiortemporal sulcus, at the back end of the temporal lobe

 Discussing the concept of recursion is like a rite of passage for anyone interested in language evolution: there are two definitions of recursion: (1) embeddedness of phrases within other phrases, which entails keeping track of long-distance dependencies among phrases; (2) the specification of the computed output string itself, including meta-recursion, where recursion is both the recipe for an utterance and the overarching process that creates and executes the recipe. There is a debate surrounding a small Amazonian tribe called the Pirahã.

Deep in the heart of the Amazon is a mysterious language no outsider has ever learned. Until now. After thirty years of research and life with the Pirahas, one man has finally...

Det har længe været et paradoks inden for sprogforskningen: Hvorfor indeholder vores sprog en række ord, som kan have vidt forskellige meninger?

New research by Australian scientists reveals that males who are exposed to high levels of testosterone before birth are twice as likely to experience delays in language development compared to females. The research, published in Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, focused on umbilical cord blood to explore the presence of testosterone when the language-related regions of a fetus' brain are undergoing a critical period of growth.

Center for Børnesprog ved Syddansk Universitet det amerikanske program, Read it again! i 128 børnehaver. Formålet er at få ny viden om sprogindsatser i Danmark samt om hvordan pædagoger bedst understøtter børns forskellige behov.

Children at risk for dyslexia show differences in brain activity on MRI scans even before they begin learning to read, finds a study at Children's Hospital Boston. Since developmental dyslexia responds to early intervention, diagnosing children at risk before or during kindergarten could head off difficulties and frustration in school, the researchers say. Findings appear this week in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Why did language evolve? While the answer might seem obvious -- as a way for individuals to exchange information -- linguists and other students of communication have debated this question for years. Many prominent linguists, including MIT’s Noam Chomsky, have argued that language is, in fact, poorly designed for communication. Such a use, they say, is merely a byproduct of a system that probably evolved for other reasons -- perhaps for structuring our own private thoughts.

When grown-ups and kids speak, they listen to the sound of their voice and make corrections based on that auditory feedback. But new evidence shows that toddlers don't respond to their own voice in quite the same way, according to a report published online on December 22 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.

People with dyslexia often struggle with the ability to accurately decode and identify what they read. Although disrupted processing of speech sounds has been implicated in the underlying pathology of dyslexia, the basis of this disruption and how it interferes with reading comprehension has not been fully explained. Now, new research published by Cell Press in the December 22 issue of the journal Neuron finds that a specific abnormality in the processing of auditory signals accounts for the main symptoms of dyslexia.

Deaf people who use sign language are quicker at recognizing and interpreting body language than hearing non-signers, according to new research from investigators at UC Davis and UC Irvine.

Sproget er meget overset, selv om vi bruger det hele tiden - ikke kun til at kommunikere med, men samtidig som et spejl på den verden som omgiver os og som brillerne vi har på, når vi ser på den. Bogen giver interessante eksempler på hvordan kultur og mentalitet hænger intimt sammen med sproget. Sprogets mange forbindelseslinjer til genstande, situationer, perception, kognition, kommunikation og semiotik er ikke det samme på alle sprog. Sprog deler sig i tre supertyper kaldet virkeligheds-, afsender- og modtager-orienterede sprog. Bogen handler altså om hvordan sproget fungerer, dvs. materien midt imellem gramatikken og litteraturen.

The study of linguistics is not a laughing matter -- unless you happen to have Stan Dubinsky as your professor. The University of South Carolina linguist has been sharing jokes and puns and cartoons with students for more than 20 years as a way of helping them understand complex concepts about the science of language.

TKE will be the 10th edition of this conference that started out under the auspices of TermNet.

VADODARA: The city will turn into a melting pot of languages this weekend. It will host 'Bhasha Vasudha' - a global languages conference - that will be attended by persons representing around 900 languages from across the globe and is touted to be unprecedented in scale

Bogstaver og ord er ifølge Erik David Johnsons studie ikke sprogets mest basale elementer. Det fundamentale er metaforerne, altså hvordan vi strukturerer input fra vores sanser i kraft af vores krop og tænkning. Denne struktur viser sig som en systematik i sproget, som forskerne kan kortlægge og aflure. »Vi opfatter i bund og grund vores verden igennem et rør. Det hele er farvet og formet af vores fysiske omstændigheder. Metaforerne er aflejret i sproget og kan ikke adskilles derfra, så derfor er det helt forkert at påstå, at man kan opbygge et sprog nedefra og op – man må tværtimod gå oppefra og ned,« siger han.

Tester talestyring av nettsider. Forskere tester om det er mulig å styre nettsider som yr.no ved hjelp av tale.

In today's Academic Minute, Dr. Jonathan Bobaljik of the University of Connecticut reveals what we can learn from studying languages on the verge of extinction.

A list of the top blogs in the Linguistics category based on 20+ different factors including RSS membership, Number of incoming links, social media, monthly visits.

Zipf er hidtil blevet nævnt én gang i Sprogmuseet. Det er ikke meget i betragtning af, at Zipf er en af sprogforskningens hjørnestene. Det drejer sig om det kvantitative hjørne; det hjørne, der er penge i.

From the moment they're born, babies are highly attuned to communicate and motivated to interact. And they're great listeners.

ÅRETS UNDERVISER - »Jeg underviser i flueknep-fonetik,« siger årets underviser med et bredt smil. John Tøndering fra Lingvistik er kåret til årets underviser på KU, fordi han gør resonans og sinuskurver spiselige for purunge humanister.

Det nye bandeordsnetværk, SwiSca, har fået sin egen hjemmeside. SwiSca er en forkortelse for Swearing in Scandinavia, og netværket består af en række nordiske forskere med interesse for bandeord. Ideen med netværket er at udveksle og formidle viden om bandeord i norden. Initiativtager og leder af netværket er forsker ved Dansk Sprognævn, Marianne Rathje.

Distinct neural pathways are important for different aspects of language processing, researchers have discovered, studying patients with language impairments caused by neurodegenerative diseases.

Lige fra barndommen bliver vi belært af omverdenen om, at man ikke skal skue hunden på hårene, og at hastværk er lastværk. Ordsprog som disse fortæller os to ting;

Harald er Københavns Universitets årlige pris til en underviser der har gjort det særlig godt, og det er de studerende der er med til nominere kandidaterne.

Kommunikasjonssamfunnet endrer det afrikanske språket oromo. Ikke med ord fra engelsk. Men ved at ord får flere betydninger.

Isländsk-skandinaviskt lexikonprojekt i hamn Det samnordiska lexikonprojektet ISLEX har avslutats med lanseringen av en flerspråkig onlineordbok med isländska som källspråk och svenska, norskt bokmål, nynorska och danska som målspråk. Totalt upptar ordboken 50 000 sökord.

Preschool children who hear their parents describe the size and shape of objects and then use those words themselves perform better on tests of their spatial skills, researchers at the University of Chicago have found.

Does understanding emotions depend on the language we speak, or is our perception the same regardless of language and culture? According to a new study by researchers from the MPI for Psycholinguistics and the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology, you don't need to have words for emotions to understand them.

I oktober ble Standard Norges nye, allment tilgjengelige termdatabase lansert. Den er resultatet av et prosjekt som ble igangsatt høsten 2009 med økonomisk støtte fra Kulturdepartementet i tråd med et tiltak foreslått i siste språkmelding. Språkrådet ledet styringsgruppen for prosjektet. Du finner SNORRE her: www.termbasen.no or www.standard.no. Les om lanseringsmøtet her: http://www.standard.no/no/Nyheter-og-produkter/Nyhetsarkiv/Generelt/2011/Termbasen-SNORRE-er-lansert-/

Termcat publishes an online dictionary on Education. This dictionary gathers more than two thousand terms related to education: general pedagogy, social pedagogy, education research, education organization and management, psycopedagogical counseling, didactics, special education and education technology. It offers definitions and denominations in Catalan, with equivalent terms in Spanish, English and French.

ett rätt extremt exempel levererades i senaste (=fredagens) sändning av P1:s Vetandets värld, där programmet inleddes med följande yttrande: ”Daylight saving time — ja så heter sommartid egentligen”. Som vanligt fick vi inte veta varför det ”egentligen” heter så, och varför vi som normalt omtalar det hela som sommartid gör oss skyldiga till språkligt slarv.

Preschool children with relatively poor language skills improve more if they are placed in classrooms with high-achieving students, a new study found.

As noted in a number of previous postings (see here and here), recently more and more non-linguists come out with research involving language. And very often, whether it's biologists, physicists or economists that make claims about language, they lack the background to understand the linguistic issues they comment or rely on. Speaking of economists making claims about language, here's one recent example.

A new study from a Yale University economist concludes that people save more or less according to the language they speak. Behavioral Economist Keith Chen is interested in how people make financial decisions. Last year, he started wondering if people whose native languages make fewer distinctions between the future and present might think differently about the future.

How many languages do you speak? This is actually a difficult question, because there’s no such thing as a language, as I argue in this video of a talk I gave as part of the Edinburgh University Linguistics & English Language Society’s Soap Vox lecture series. I argue that ‘languages’ are not discrete, monolithic, static entities – they are fuzzy, emergent, complex, dynamic, context-sensitive categories.

Many linguists believe all human languages derived from a single tongue spoken in East Africa around 50,000 years ago. They've found clues scattered throughout the vocabularies and grammars of the world as to how that original "proto-human language" might have sounded. New research suggests that it sounded somewhat like the speech of Yoda, the tiny green Jedi from Star Wars

Rækkefølgen af sætningsled i et sprog har udviklet sig i bestemte mønstre fra et stamsprog, hævder omstridte sprogforskere.

As words can be the soul's window, scientists are learning to peer through it: Computerized text analysis shows that psychopathic killers make identifiable word choices -- beyond conscious control -- when talking about their crimes.

Researchers at St. Michael's Hospital have found that people who speak more than one language have twice as much brain damage as unilingual people before they exhibit symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. It's the first physical evidence that bilingualism delays the onset of the disease.

KU har åbnet en talesprogsbutik for skole- og gymnasieelever og deres lærere.

The BBC television program “Planet Word“, hosted by Stephen Fry, has featured interviews and demonstrations with at least two prominent Ig Nobel people.

Modern technology allows us to communicate in more ways than ever before, but this virtual communication usually lacks the body gestures so common in face-to-face interactions.

Viden-om- hjerneforskning forsøger at give en indføring i hjerneforskning, når den er rettet mod skriftsproglige processer. Hvad sker egentlig i hjernen, når vi læser eller skriver? Er der et ’egentligt center i hjernen’, hvorfra alle skriftsproglige processer udgår? – eller er der snarere tale om komplicerede neurale netværk, som ikke er lige til at gennemskue? Og hvordan kan viden om hjernens processer inddrages og kvalificere tilrettelæggelsen af pædagogisk praksis?

Students who in addition to their traditional German language courses are taught other courses in German end up with both a stronger vocabulary and a better communicative ability, according to a new doctoral thesis in German from the University of Gothenburg.

Canadian scientists who specialize in learning, memory and language in children have found exciting evidence that pre-schoolers can improve their verbal intelligence after only 20 days of classroom instruction using interactive, music-based cognitive training cartoons.

International Conference Training in Terminology

Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab får ny direktør.

Language change among our prehistoric ancestors came about via the arrival of immigrant men -- rather than women -- into new settlements, according to new research.

Hvis du slurver når du prater, signaliserer du at du er trygg og selvsikker på språket du snakker, mener dansk språkforsker.

A new mathematical model mimics the process of speech and noise recognition in the human brain efficiently. It may explain experimental findings that remained unclear so far.

Watching children on the playground, we see them run, climb, slide, get up, and do it all again. While their movements are continuous, we language-users can easily divide them up and name each one. But what about people -- babies -- who don't yet have words? How do they make sense of a world in motion?

Since the first television screens lit up our living rooms scientists have been studying its affect on young children. Now scientists in Ohio have compared mother-child communication while watching TV to reading books or playing with toys to reveal the impact on children's development. The results, published in Human Communication Research, show that watching TV can lead to less interaction between parents and children, with a detrimental impact on literacy and language skills.

The 16th European Maya Conference is co-organized by the University of Copenhagen (Department of American Indian Languages and Cultures, Institute of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies), the Danish National Museum (Nationalmuseet) and Wayeb (European Association of Mayanists), and will be held from December 5th to 10th, 2011 in Copenhagen, Denmark. A four-day Workshop (Dec. 5-8th) will precede a two-day Symposium (Dec. 9-10th).

Danish is hard enough to learn, but even harder to understand. PhD student in phonetics at Copenhagen Business School, Ruben Schachtenhaufen explains why Danish sounds like gibberish

An online academic journal, Te Kōtihitihi – Ngā Tuhinga Reo Māori, published solely in te reo Māori was launched on Thursday 14 April at the University of Waikato. Topics range from language revitalisation, Māori history, tikanga and mātauranga Māori. It also as an original haka composition performed at Te Matatini.

Ordblindhed er et alvorligt problem for mange mennesker. Desværre bliver det ikke altid opdaget i rette tid. »Traditionen i norske skoler ved mistanken om ordblindhed er 'vent og se'.

Some people exhibit a neurological condition known as synaesthesia. For them, numbers or letters or days of the week are characterized by different hues.

Kanskje Wittgenstein tok feil? Vi trenger en metode for å oppklare språklig forvirring i filosofien, mente filosofen Wittgenstein. - Kanskje ikke, sier norsk forsker.

The editors, publishers, and plumbers of Speculative Grammarian are pleased to be announce that another soggy issue of our well-plumbed journal is now available.