Sprognyheder

As the latest set of contestants fail the infamous Turing Test, John Pavlus explores what it will take to create a computer that can think like a human.

American Sign Language happens to be the sixth most-used language in the US and yet there are few options when it comes to bridging the communication gap between those who understand the language and those who don’t. However, that may soon change with an interesting project by three engineering students from Cornell University who have developed a glove that can translate gestures into spoken letters.

Recently deceased language preserved online

Understanding the linguistic diversity found among London's schoolchildren is a key factor in assuring the city's future as a "global player" researchers say.

Pakistan is one of the many countries in the modern world that can boast of a rich cultural, demographic, and geographic diversity. People in the US are often surprised when they are told that Pakistan has beautiful mountain ranges and places where it snows even in summer (many Americans consider Pakistan to be a desert country somewhere in the Middle East!). The same Americans are frequently stunned to learn that Pakistan is a multilingual country where roughly 72 languages are spoken (many Americans think that every country in the world is largely monolingual and mono-ethnic).

After 34 painstaking years, a small band of Inuit translators have finally delivered an Inuktitut-language bible to one of the most-Christian regions in Canada.

Bangladesh can justly claim to be a nation born of language, but its status as a cradle of linguistic diversity is under threat from nationalist pride and economic growth.

Three Tamil Nadu MPs from different parties on Sunday made a strong pitch for making Tamil one of the official languages and opposed any move to impose Hindi on the country.

Translators and publishers speak on the challenges along the way to getting Arab translations up to speed with other languages, concluding that a one-man solution is impossible

 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.

These biodiversity hotspots and wilderness areas must be among our top priorities for terrestrial conservation if we hope to preserve Earth's natural ecosystem services and biodiversity for future generations of people.

The Independent has a story by David Keys, "Ancient language discovered on clay tablets found amid ruins of 2800 year old Middle Eastern palace," that will make the heart of any aficionado of the ancient Near East beat faster. Not that they've discovered an epic poem, or even a laundry list—it's just a bunch of names—but we aficionados will take what we can get, and this is actually pretty exciting:

Wish you had time to learn a new language? Check out this Chrome extension that adds words in your target language into the sites you're already reading. Read this blog post by Nicole Cozma on How To.

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.

It looks just like iRobot's Roomba vacuuming machine, except the new circular roaming vacuum cleaner from Sharp Corp. is trilingual, and even knows a hip humorous dialect.

The Chukchansi variety of the Yokuts language will be preserved and revitalized thanks to a $1 million gift from the Picayune Rancheria of the Chukchansi Indians to Fresno State’s College of Arts and Humanities for the Department of Linguistics

SB130 would establish the Alaska Native Language Preservation and Advisory Council, which would evaluate the state's 20 indigenous languages and make recommendations for preservation, restoration and revitalization. Olson said that while educators have made great efforts, indigenous people throughout Alaska feel first languages continue to become extinct. One example of this, he said, is when the last speaker of Eyak, died in 2008.

A lost parakeet in Japan was returned safely to its owner last week after it told police its home address. Why do captive birds mimic human speech, and how do they decide what to say? They’re trying to fit in with the flock, and they’ll say whatever it takes. Parrots...

A pet parakeet was returned to its owner Wednesday after the lost bird told police its home address near Tokyo.

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

A further 111,000 people use the language outside school at least once a week, but 439,000 never do it · Almost 70% of Gaeltacht dwellers declare themselves as speakers of the Celtic language.

In 2001 the Frisian Broadcasting Company Omrop Fryslân has produced a series of five documentary films for the national TV in the Netherlands which shows the position of some minority languages in Eastern Europe and the Russian Federation and the work related to the study and safeguarding of these languages. The first film in this series describes the reconstruction of historical sound material in the archives of the Pushkinsky Dom, the Russian Institute of Literature in Saint-Petersburg. It shows the collection of Edison wax cylinders and the way material of some endangered languages in Russia can be obtained from these recordings. You can watch it online.

India is one of the most linguistically diverse countries. Just how diverse is a matter of contention, but it is believed between 850 and 900 distinct languages are spoken in India, though only 122 are recognised in the census and just 22 are scheduled as official languages in the constitution. Of mother tongues, it was estimated in 1961 that India was home to more than 1600. India is also losing languages faster than any other nation.

Spoken by only a few dozen people, a language uttered in river villages 3,000 miles from Alaska is related to Tlingit, Eyak and Athabaskan. This curious link has researchers wondering how people in the middle of Siberia are related to Alaskans and other North Americans -- and what it means to the populating of the Americas

In “From Elvish to Klingon,” a new collection of essays edited by Michael Adams (author of “Slang: The People’s Poetry”), the contributors explore the scope of invented languages. The collection shows clearly what makes invented languages fascinating—their logic, beauty, fun, and (often) high moral purpose. But it leaves aside a bigger question: what makes them catch on—or fail to?

Bremen. Plattdeutsch muss stärker gefördert werden. Das fordern Bremer Politiker, die nun einen eigenen Beirat für die Minderheitensprache einführen wollen. In anderen Bundesländern und im Ausland bekommt die Sprache bereits mehr Unterstützung.

Diese These sorgte für Schlagzeilen: Das Kiezdeutsch, das Jugendliche in Berliner Hinterhöfen sprechen, sei ein neuer Dialekt, behauptete unlängst die Potsdamer Germanistin Heike Wiese. Das aber sei grundfalsch, erwidert ihr nun der Bamberger Sprachwissenschaftler Helmut Glück (62) im Interview.

Wikipedia existiert momentan in 285 verschiedenen Sprachen. Herausgeflogen ist Klingonisch, mit dabei sind dafür Rumantsch, Volapük und die Sprache der Amischen, die kein Internet wollen.

To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language: A series of experiments on more than 300 people from the U.S. and Korea found that thinking in a second language reduced deep-seated, misleading biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived.

Linguists have been predicting the death of Alaska Native languages for decades now, and whether or not those predictions prove accurate comes down to the choices you and I make on a daily basis. The past 200 years have been devastating; from boarding schools to disease to social discriminations, we are now left with the aftermath of successful attempts to destroy languages and cultures. But that does not mean we have to resign our efforts or just allow this to happen

The Centre today promised to consider according official status to Kumaoni, Gharwali and other local languages.

Celebrates six years of translation

US and UK policy to promote English language teaching expertise around the world is undermining multilingualism and education opportunities.

As part of the World Shakespeare Festival, Shakespeare's Globe Theatre is taking on its most ambitious project to date: 37 of Shakespeare's plays performed by theatre companies from around the world, in just six weeks. The season starts just before Shakespeare's birthday on 21 April, and presents every one of Shakespeare's 37 plays in a different language.

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.

As well as Belgium’s French and Flemish-speaking regions, a handful of municipalities speak German. But, with increasing division between Flanders and Wallonia, the eastern Cantons have been looking at their options.

Eine mathematisch-sprachliche Doppelbegabung war er schon als Schüler: der Gießener Mathematikprofessor und Sprachwissenschaftler Ernst Kausen. Bei Buske bringt er in zwei Bänden ein Mammutwerk für Fachwelt und interessierte Laien heraus: "Die indogermanischen Sprachen" und "Die Sprachfamilien der Welt".

Music is neither instinct nor invention—or, from another perspective, music is both—and this debate provides an opportunity to remind ourselves that there is a third option for the origins of music, an option that I have argued may also underlie our writing and language capabilities.

French language activists say there are hundreds of violations of Bill 101 going on in Montreal, so on Wednesday morning they filed 850 complaints with the Office Quebecois de la langue Francaise.

There are about 66 languages and dialectic variations spoken in Pakistan. Besides the regional languages Punjabi, Pashto, Sindhi, Balochi and the national language Urdu, people often do not know about other languages. For instance, in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa alone, many languages are spoken besides Pashto

Australia, which was once home to 200 languages, now suffers from the highest rate of language extinction in the world.

Paul McCartney's latest video is a shout-out to the deaf community, featuring Johnny Depp, Natalie Portman and some unfortunate sign language bloopers.

Intermingling of the Caribs, Africans and indigenous Arawaks resulted in the Garifuna language, which also was influenced by English, Spanish and French. Garifuna belongs to the Arawak linguistic family, whose members are mostly found in the Amazon Basin. The language, music and dance of the Garifuna were collectively proclaimed a “masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity” by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 2001.

The International Federation of Translators - FIT's - nyhedsbrev, marts 2012 er på gaden nu.

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

Kazuo Ueda toiled quietly in southern Japan for two decades in a quest both impressive and quixotic: compiling the world's first Yiddish-Japanese dictionary. It's the first time the Jewish language has been translated into a non-European language other than Hebrew.

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.

Mandarin is slowly becoming the second language of business, according to not one, not two, but three articles in The New York Times over the weekend...

Timor-Leste has chosen Portuguese as its official language of government, though Tetum remains the other official language. This language policy, a return to its colonial heritage, has future implications for the state’s development and geopolitical relations in the region.

Oracle and Google's phalanxes of lawyers are finally set to face off in a San Francisco courtroom, after two years of pretrial wrangling in their dispute over Android and the Java programming language.

The Ladino language is in trouble. However, one group of singers from Los Angeles is helping it find a second life through music.

One hundred years after Alan Turing was born, his eponymous test remains an elusive benchmark for artificial intelligence. Now, for the first time in decades, it's possible to imagine a machine making the grade.

In 2010, the World Economic Forum designated Sweden as the most gender-equal country in the world. But for many Swedes, gender equality is not enough. Many are pushing for the Nordic nation to be not simply gender-equal but gender-neutral.

On April 6, 2012, the Tuareg rebels declared the independence of the territory under their control in northern Mali, deeming the country “Azawad.”

Laz, which is classified by UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger as a “critically endangered language,” has an estimated number of speakers between 250,000 and 500,000 in Turkey. The majority of Laz have immigrated to urban areas in western Turkey in the last 20 years. The families that still speak Laz only do so among adults in informal situations. This means that the younger generations fail to fully acquire the language.

Campaigners say Breton, Occitan, Corsican and others will soon cease to be living languages without formal recognition.

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

A first-of-its kind series of brain studies shows how an adult learning a foreign language can come to use the same brain mechanisms as a native speaker. The research also demonstrates that the kind of exposure you have to the language can determine whether you achieve native-language brain processing, and that learning under immersion conditions may be more effective in reaching this goal than typical classroom training. The research also suggests that the brain consolidates knowledge of the foreign language as time goes on, much like it does when a person learns to ride a bike or play a musical instrument.

Ever since English was declared as the only language of instruction in schools, teachers and learners with a strong background of French language had been struggling to come to terms with the change. In October 2008, after Rwanda became a member of the East African Community, the government affirmed English to be the official language of instruction, opening Rwanda up to a world of new opportunities

Säuglinge sind viel klüger als gedacht. Kinder lernen schon im Mutterleib. Bevor sie selbst sprechen, wissen sie schon viel über Sprache.

Mobilisation nationale, samedi 31 mars : les défenseurs des langues régionales manifesteront ce jour-là, notamment çà Quimper, contre la "frilosité" de l'Etat à l'encontre de ces patrimoines menacés. Avec un objectif précis : profiter de la campagne présidentielle pour réclamer une nouvelle fois la ratification de la Charte pour la sauvegarde des langues régionales.

Die grüne Studentenorganisation GRAS fordert in einer Broschüre zum "geschlechtergerechten" Formulieren auf.

In an effort to eliminate potential "unpleasant emotions" among students, the New York Department of Education has placed a ban on mentions of "birthdays," "dinosaurs," "Halloween," and "dancing," in city-issued tests, the New York Post reports. According to the paper, the mandate is meant to curb fear that references to those topics might stir controversy among students. Dinosaurs, officials said, could bring up evolution, Halloween could suggest paganism, and birthdays might create animosity among students who are Jehovah's witnesses, since they don't celebrate them.

The idea that animals like Flipper can communicate with humans is not just the preserve of the small and big screen. History is littered with celebrity animals who have communicated with human scientists, with varying degrees of success.

How a teacher in Homer, N.Y., changed the way students learn grammar.

A new study by a Yale University economist suggests that the language you speak can have an impact on your long-term well-being by affecting how you think about saving money, smoking, exercise, an...

Protesters angry at decree that will remove a requirement to be able to speak Catalan for those working at the public sector · The demonstration's manifesto says that the Balearic government “undermines” the right of islanders to speak Catalan · A pensioner on hunger strike for almost one month.

Until the end of the 19th century Norwegian pupils struggled hard to learn Latin. Some students have been continuing to do just that up to this day.

For the French, who pride themselves on being citizens of a cultural superpower, the current global dominance of the English language is somewhat upsetting.

It is as though the word - coyly known as the C-word, the C-bomb, the Anglo-Saxon swear word, tnuc or C U Next Tuesday - has a life of its own. Unlike other words in our lexicon, which we marshal and deploy to suit us, ''c...'' seems to exist outside and beyond us, with a mysterious and plosive power belonging only to it. It is a word even the most liberal of swearers hesitate to use and is arguably the most notorious in the English language, so taboo it's heard less often than the N-word. Feminists hate it, most comedians avoid it, grown men are punished for saying it. It has caused sackings and scandals, bannings and banishment. When pronounced, it sounds hard and violent. Even Germaine Greer admits it is shocking.

John Bowman, of Leaver Road, Henley, says he is able to greet people in 49 languages and is “working on a few more”. He said: “I’m a walking phrase book. I don’t consider myself clever — I don’t even know my own mobile phone number — I just have a knack for it.”

Over 1,200 sq m and more then 80 interactive work stations invite visitors of all age groups to participate and explore the world of language and communication.

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

Children with English as their home language are now the minority of pupils in more than 1,600 schools across England. There are 97 schools where children with English as their first language are in such a minority that they make up less than one in twenty pupils.

One language we didn't include in our debate about the best language to learn was Esperanto. That is now number five in the poll—ahead of Latin and Arabic. the dream of Esperanto as a second language with none of the cultural baggage of other ones has never gained critical mass, and now there's a fair chance that the dream may be killed off forever, thanks to the computer.

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?

A group from the Institutions Markets Technologies' Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies in Italy, describe how they have found after studying English, Spanish and Hebrew trends, that words are being dropped from languages faster and new ones added at a slower rate, than at any other time over the past three hundred years.

A New York teenager taught himself to speak over a dozen languages. How did he do it?

Speaking two languages rather than only one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalised world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people.

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.

A group of researchers who recently asked the public for help in figuring out a mysterious language used in the DuQu virus have solved the puzzle, thanks to crowdsourcing help from programmers who wrote in to offer suggestions and clues.

The Greek businesswoman who decried an Irish airline's policy of making Greek travelers pass language tests to prove their nationality has received free flights for her family and an explicit promise it has abandoned the practice.

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.

Turkish cybersquatter has registered at least a dozen variants of Pope Benedict's name as .xxx internet domains and is using them to promote Islam.

Twitter is now available in languages written right-to-left, including Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu. Work began earlier this year via their Translation

“We are offering Armenian courses, and we are thinking about giving Syriac courses later on,” Mayor Abdullah Demirbaş said.

Anthropologists always knew that storytelling is a universal feature of every country and every culture, even if, for most of the 20th Century, storytelling got very little respect. As so-called scientific approaches to life became dominant, mechanistic, machine-like thinking was everywhere triumphant. Analysis was king. Narrative was seen as either infantile or trivial

To this day, Paraguay remains the only country in the Americas where a majority of the population speaks one indigenous language: Guaraní. It is enshrined in the Constitution, officially giving it equal footing with the language of European conquest, Spanish. And in the streets, it is a source of national pride.

Mit Ausschluss Basta! haben wir 2011 dem austriakischen Integrations-Theater eine Absage erteilt. Dieses Jahr reden wir übers Reden: Unsere gemeinsame Sprache ist nicht Deutsch! Wir rufen zum Streik gegen den Deutschzwang auf. Sprechen wir gemeinsam die Sprache der gleichen Rechte – am 1. März beim transnationalen, translationalen Migrant_innenstreik. Let´s Sprachstreik the one-language-show down!

Technology aimed at translating sign language into text is being developed by Aberdeen scientists. The portable sign language translator (PSLT) would use the camera on devices such as laptops and phones. An app would then translate the movements into text which can be read by people, who may not understand sign language.

Pioneering technology which translates sign language into text is being developed by Scottish scientists in a major boost for people suffering from speech and hearing difficulties. The new software – the first of its kind in the world – has been developed for use on portable devices, such as smartphones, and will allow users to turn sign language into words. Users will even be able to customise the sign language to their own specific needs

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.

Deaf children in Viet Nam will soon have access to opportunities to learn their native sign language through the projectIntergenerational Deaf Education Outreach, which was launched today in Ha Noi.

Whether it be uptalk (pronouncing statements as if they were questions? Like this?), creating slang words like “bitchin’ ” and “ridic,” or the incessant use of “like” as a conversation filler, vocal trends associated with young women are often seen as markers of immaturity or even stupidity. Right?

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.