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The way people discuss the future varies from language to language. Some have a well-defined future tense, while others distinguish much between present and future. But does this point of grammar actually affect how we see the world? More »
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Metaphors and other figurative language are deeply woven into the fabric of human communication, as this very sentence actually demonstrates. But how do our brains translate these metaphors into something they can understand? More »
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Between political disagreements, economic instability, and climate troubles, you might assume every newspaper is full of bad news. Weirdly enough, the exact opposite is true. No matter what's going on in the real world, English is a perversely positive language. More »
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Most species will raise the alarm instinctively if they see a deadly threat. Chimpanzees, however, are way too sophisticated for all that. They actually figure out if the other chimps are aware of the threat, before bothering to say anything. More »
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Perhaps the most complicated task that a baby faces is learning the language, a process that's particularly intense between 18 months and two years old. But before that burst of learning, babies are picking up on crucial linguistic patterns. More »
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It all sounds a bit insane: people who like sweet foods are someone just generally nicer than people who don't. It sounds like the latest example of dubious evolutionary psychology, but it's actually about how language subtly shapes our behavior. More »
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What languages sounded like before a few thousand years ago is one of the great unsolvable mysteries of modern science. Now two linguists have come up with a bold hypothesis: the speakers of the oldest known language spoke like Yoda. More »
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Klingon is good for a lot of things: yelling, death rituals, Charles Dickens. But according to the testimony of an English man, learning Klingon has helped him mitigate his dyslexia. More »
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If you try to figure out the connection between how words sound and what they mean, you'll be working for a long, long time. While patterns do exist, most language sounds are random...and there's a very good reason for that. More »
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Hey everyone, we need to talk. There's really no easy way to put this, so I'll just give it to you straight. Disney lied to us; pirates almost definitely didn't talk like, well, pirates — at least not like the salty dogs and scalawags in Hollywood that we're all familiar with. More »
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We've all heard of The Klingon Hamlet, a real book that contains a Klingon translation of the text side-by-side with the English version. Some of us have even been . . . let's say 'lucky' enough to see it performed. But what other famous works would be better rendered in science fictional languages? We've got some suggestions. More »
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While there's nothing quite like reeling off a string of profanities to blow off some steam, our brains might not agree with that sentiment. Saying swear words out loud actually triggers reactions deep in the emotion centers of the brain. More »
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The accepted wisdom is that kids under the age of seven have a better chance at fluently learning a language than adults do. That may not be the case. In fact, it may be no more than a flimsy excuse. In some respects, adults may be better at learning languages than children. More »
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When a stock market bubble is about to burst, financial experts start using all the same words to describe what's going on, even if - especially if - those words are positive. Groupthink doesn't get much more perilous than this. More »
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Recently, hardware hacker Phil Torrone from Adafruit started learning Chinese. And of course the first thing he did with his newfound knowledge was try to translate the characters he'd seen on computer screens in Firefly and Serenity. Writes Torrone: More »
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There are lots of animals, including dogs and apes, that can communicate in something we might understand as sentences. But only one non-human species has complex enough communication that they actually need grammatical rules. Say hello to the Bengal finch. More »
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Alex the parrot died in 2007, after learning more words than any bird before him. He changed the way people think about animal intelligence. But his education wouldn't have been possible without an unsung research assistant who pretended to be a parrot. More »
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Generally speaking, romantic relationships form around common interests, compatible personality traits, or similar beliefs and values. But none of that compares to the love connection that can be formed by using basic words like "he" or "and" together. More »
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Researchers recently discovered that chimps have over twice the number of sign language-like gestures than previously thought. Through painstaking effort, the researchers learned to decode which gestures meant, "I like your face," versus "I'm going to claw your face off." More »
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The idea that language affects the way we look at the world is hardly new. But could your personality actually change depending on which language you're speaking? That's the idea put forward by a new psychological study. More »
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Filler words like "um" and "er" may seem like the enemy of good speech - just ask anyone about to do a bit of public speaking - but they actually play a crucial role in helping children learn the language. More »
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Biologist Denise Herzing has been studying wild spotted dolphins for years in the Bahamas. Like many people who research dolphins, she's heard the animals communicating with each other but hasn't figured out how to understand what they're saying. And yet dolphins have learned our languages: Many studies have shown that dolphins can understand human vocabulary and syntax. The problem is that dolphins can't respond in kind: They simply aren't able to make the sounds required to speak our languages. Herzing wanted to change that. So she set out to construct a shared language with dolphins, using a synthesizer to create a vocabulary both species could pronounce. And it worked better than she'd ever hoped. More »
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People need language to fully understand numbers. This discovery – long suspected, and now backed by strong evidence – may shed light on the way children acquire their number sense. More »
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Newborn babies have an instinctual need to hear their mother's voice...and nobody else's. For the first time ever, electrodes were placed on babies hours after their birth to probe the connection between the mother's voice and their newborn brains. More »
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Take a look at the picture and honestly tell me which shape you would match to the word ‘bouba' and which you would match to the word ‘kiki'. More »
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A group of linguists doing research in northeastern India have accidentally stumbled across the linguistics equivalent of a rare jewel: Koro, a language completely unlike others in the region, spoken by only a tiny number of people. More »
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Echolocation in bats is generally seen as a sort of natural sonar, in which the bats use ultrasonic clicks to navigate the night sky and find prey. But it may also be a rudimentary language, transmitting greetings and social information. More »
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Next year, the first URLs made up of non-latin characters will appear on the internet. We give it maybe ten seconds until someone is complaining that the net has become corrupted and lost sight of its original purpose. More »
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While other primates have exhibited simple vocabularies, it has long been believed that syntax, the construction of sentences, was unique to humans. But a recent study suggests that at least one species of monkey communicates in vocalized sentences. More »
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We all know that you haven't really heard Shakespeare until you've heard his works in the original Klingon. So one fan took it upon himself to dress as the Klingon prince Khamlet and recite the play's classic soliloquy. More »
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The Na'vi language in Avatar isn't just a collection of pretty sounds. It's an actual language, constructed by a USC linguistics professor, complete with its own grammar and syntax. He talks language creation, and explains how Na'vi compares with Klingon. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5410584&view=rss&microfeed=true Some parents try to teach their infant children a foreign language, but d'Armond Speers took his son's linguistic education to a whole new level. Speers claims that he spoke to his son only in Klingon for the first three years of the boy's life. Not only did his son start parroting the alien language; Speers' interest in Klingon has also landed him a job. When a dictionary and translation software company called Ultralingua sought to create applications based on a Klingon dictionary, they turned to Speers, who is a software consultant and expert in computational linguistics. [Minnesota Daily via City Pages via Reddit] More »
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Over At Accelerating Future, Michael Anissimov has used Google Trends to do a quick analysis of how many people searched on the term "transhumanism" over the past five years. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5295584&view=rss&microfeed=true Apparently the word "fracking" isn't just a Battlestar Galactica curse that means sexytime. It's also a term that comes from mining, and refers to an unregulated (in the US) practice of pumping chemical-laced liquids underground at high pressure to help bring gasses to the surface. Sounds scary. Apparently people living in the vicinity of frack operations have found that it dramatically affects aquifers, messing with water pressure and making shower water mildly toxic. via Treehugger More »
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Panbanisha is a prolific painter whose works have sold for hundreds of dollars. She also happens to be a bonobo, one of many apes learning language skills at the Great Ape Trust. To raise money for ape conservation work, the Trust is auctioning off paintings created by Panbanisha and the other ape artists-in-residence. Click through to see a gallery of primate paintings and watch the bonobo’s creative process. More »
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So you want to invent a cool alien race, complete with a fleshed-out language, for your game, book, movie, or personal benefit. There are others like you out there: they're called conlangers, and they construct elaborate languages for fun or to make the portrait of an alien race more believable. Rule number one of conlanging, however, is know the history of human languages. That way, you know the range of what's already been done — and you can deviate from it accordingly. And this beautiful chart of the history of Indo-European languages is just the thing to get your brain zooming. More »
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Chances are when alien visitors show up, they won't speak any language we can recognize. We'll be lucky if they have recognizable music, like the aliens in Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow. They may not have eyes or ears, as we understand them. So how can we prove to our first contacts that we're smart enough to talk to — let alone actually talk to them? Vote for your preferred method of dialogue! More »
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