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Babies are easy to underestimate. This is understandable; after all, when most of us interact with an infant, we see a clumsy, messy creature — one more adept at stringing together strange gurgling noises than distinct consonants and vowels. More »
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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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Putting a good spin on things, verbally, can be a habit, a necessary business skill, or a vocation unto itself. Take a look at euphemism, who it hurts and who it benefits, and how different cultures, both internationally and intranationally, deploy it. 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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The 1973 study "Graffiti: Some Observations and Speculations" by Dr. Harvey Lomas included this colorful chart matching bawdy vandalism from First Century Pompeii with its thematic descendants in Sixties Los Angeles. As you can see here, we've had our mind in the gutter for approximately two millennia. 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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The spread of different languages in ancient times might seem like a difficult thing to track, but a big part of the story is actually hidden in our genes. Here's the twist: language change is a male-dominated phenomenon. More »
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Want to help transcribe ancient Greek texts from the comfort of your couch? Have no understanding of the Greek language? That's ok! With Egypt Exploration Society and Oxford University's Ancient Lives project, you can contribute to the work of researchers who are digitizing — and eventually decoding — the vast holdings of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, a mysterious pile of Greek papers discovered in an ancient dump outside Egypt. And you can do it just by playing a puzzle game. 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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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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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 »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5816441&view=rss&microfeed=true Do you fear Friday the 13th? Well, you'd better stay inside today and nurse your paraskevidekatriaphobia, which is the official term - derived from Greek - meaning "fear of Friday and thirteen." Apparently the phobia was originally called friggatriskaidekaphobia, but that pissed off language nerds because it combined a Norse root (frigga, for Friday) with the Greek phobia. Let Language Log break it all down for you. 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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How do we know what ancient Egyptian sounded like, or Old English? Linguistics gives us the tools to reconstruct lost languages from the words we speak today. Here's how it's done. More »
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What exactly is the half-life of celebrity? A new field called culturomics has the answer. Using the largest linguistic database ever created - Google Books - culturomics experts track things like "lexical dark matter," and how long fame really lasts. More »
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Researchers from Carnegie Mellon and the University of Arizona are creating a "roboceptionist" that speaks Arabic and English and is culturally attuned to whomever she's conversing with. She's a regular Maxima Headroom. 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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What does "Uh(m)" mean? Professional linguists from a selection of highly respected international academic institutions have pondered the question in detail over the years, but now a new paper goes considerably further towards consolidating the answer(s). More »
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Constructing an entire alien language is the most challenging task in all of speculative fiction, and there are two examples that tower above the rest: J.R.R. Tolkien's Elvish and Marc Okrand's Klingon. We'll show you how to outdo even them. More »
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The lost language of Ugaritic was last spoken 3,500 years ago. It survives on just a few tablets, and linguists could only translate it with years of hard work and plenty of luck. A computer deciphered it in hours. More »
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In "Language and science fiction," Paul Kincaid notes a curious predicament science fiction authors face — often, scifi stories occur in the unfathomable future or another world, so how can a book's language sound exotic (and not anachronistic)? More »
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In the following essay, Anassa Rhenisch discusses why alien languages will have almost nothing in common with human tongues...and why alien forms of communication could eschew language altogether. More »
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Wanna zahelu with some Pandoran exchange students on spring break? Then you'll need this online Na'vi-English dictionary from Learn Na'vi. Master a few choice phrases and you'll have yourself a dreadlock dalliance guaranteed. More »
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Linguist and conservative commentator John McWhorter estimates the 6,000 languages spoken today will dwindle to only 600 next century. He argues that this is part of a process that will confer economic and health benefits to the affected speakers. 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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Can science create the ultimate David Bowie song? Psychologist Nick Troop has performed a psycholyrical analysis of David Bowie's most successful songs, using that analysis to create what he claims are lyrics to the ideal Bowie tune. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5347017&view=rss&microfeed=true To make up for the sad lack of Klingons in the new Trek flick, there's a great article over at Slate about the Klingon language. Written by Akira Okrent, a linguist who was studying conlangs (constructed languages), it is the funny and often moving story of how she went from amused observer of people who speak Klingon - to a full-fledged member of the group. For those of you who don't know, Klingon was invented by linguist Marc Okrand, and it has a robust grammar and vocabulary, maintained by the Klingon Language Institute. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5246292&view=rss&microfeed=true Over at the Oxford University Press blog, Michael Quinion, author of Gallimaufry: A Hodgepodge of Our Vanishing Vocabulary, suggests that it might be impossible for humans and aliens ever to communicate. He writes: More »
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Janni Pedersen is one of the only linguists in the world whose research focuses on a non-human language. The Iowa State University researcher at the Great Ape Trust in Iowa, US, studies the language capabilities of bonobos, especially ones who have been trained to communicate with humans. Like chimps, bonobos can learn to communicate with humans using objects or hand gestures that correspond to words or ideas. And now Pedersen has just published a paper in the Journal of Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science that shows bonobos communicate more like humans than we thought. More »
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If you're fascinated by alien languages and futuristic human slang, you're in luck. Eastern Michigan University, with the help of linguistics-loving scifi author Suzette Haden Elgin, has put together an exhaustive list of scifi novels that feature every flavor of strange, imaginary language. A couple of weeks ago we posted a beautiful diagram showing the lineage of most Western languages, and now with this list you can move forward into the possible future of those languages. 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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Dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster announced yesterday that "w00t," the cyber-talk word for "yay," is word of the year. Apparently it reflects the future of language. Spelled with two zeros, w00t is the kind of coinage that Merriam-Webster president John Morse says he would expect from a generation raised on computers and cell phones. But Global Language Monitor, a group that uses an algorithm to track word popularity in the media and online, says the main word on everyone's typing fingertips this year was "hybrid." As in the car. What were the weird runners-up? More »
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