Evolution of Language Takes Unexpected Turn | Wired Science It’s widely thought that human language evolved in universally similar ways, following trajectories common across place and culture, and possibly reflecting common linguistic structures in our brains. But a massive, millennium-spanning analysis of humanity’s major language families suggests otherwise. Instead, language seems to have evolved along varied, complicated paths, guided less by neurological settings than cultural circumstance. If our minds do shape the evolution of language, it’s likely at levels deeper and more nuanced than many researchers anticipated. “It’s terribly important to understand human cognition, and how the human mind is put together,” said Michael Dunn, an evolutionary linguist at Germany’s Max Planck Institute and co-author of the new study, published April 14 in Nature. How languages have emerged and changed through human history is a subject of ongoing fascination. That’s not what they found. “Each language family is evolving according to its own set of rules.
Word Spy For Better for Verse | Sonnet 73 accent: emphasis given a syllable in ordinary usage, as provided by a pronouncing dictionary. See also stress. accentual-syllabic: the prosodic mode that dominated English-language poetry 1400-1900, and that this tutorial exclusively addresses. acephalous line: a “headless” line in iambic or anapestic meter, which omits (a) slack syllable(s) from the first foot. alexandrine: iambic hexameter line, usually with a strong midpoint caesura; most familiar in Romance-language poetry but not rare in English. alliteration: repetition of the same initial sound in nearby words. anapest: metrical foot consisting of two slacks and a stress: υ υ / anaphora: repetition of a word or phrase in initial position. assonance: harmonious repetition of the same vowel sound in nearby words. ballad meter: quatrain in alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter lines rhyming abxb, traditionally used in folk narrative and during modern times adapted to lyric poetry. blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter. caesura: consonance:
May/June 2010 > Features > Cognitive Scientist Lera Boroditsky Can language shape how we think? A Stanford researcher says yes, and her work speaks volumes about what makes people tick. By Joan O'C. Hamilton Lera Boroditsky's journey to answer one of psychology's most intriguing and fractious questions has been a curious one. She's spent hours showing Spanish-speakers videos of balloons popping, eggs cracking and paper ripping. "In English," she says, moving her hand toward the cup, "if I knock this cup off the table, even accidentally, you would likely say, 'She broke the cup.'" If one deliberately knocks the cup, there is a verb form to indicate as much. The question is: Does the fact that one language tends to play the blame game while the other does not mean speakers of those languages think differently about what happened? As anyone who's studied a new language understands well, languages differ in myriad ways beyond simply having, as comedian Steve Martin once observed, "a different word for everything." Consider space. Not so in Indonesian.
Language Evolution Internet Anagram Server / I, Rearrangement Servant : anagram, anagrams, nag a ram, software, anagramme, anagrama, wordplay, word play, anagram creator, anagram solver, anagram finder, anagram generator, anagram maker, anagram unscrambler, anagram machine, In News:The New York TimesSydney Morning HeraldThe Globe and MailJerusalem Post Did you know that parliament is an anagram of partial men? Or, Clint Eastwood an anagram of Old West Action? Someone once said, "All the life's wisdom can be found in anagrams. Anagrams never lie." Here is your chance to discover the wisdom of anagrams. Glossary of linguistic terms - StumbleUpon Context for this page: Modular book: Glossary of linguistic terms, by Eugene E. Loos (general editor), Susan Anderson (editor), Dwight H., Day, Jr. (editor), Paul C. Jordan (editor), and J. Douglas Wingate (editor) In bookshelf: Linguistics
Languages - Homepage: All you need to start learning a foreign language Simulated Linguistic Evolution In The Laboratory About a week ago, I read and posted on a summary piece on cultural evolution research in PLoS Biology. The reviewer introduced me to Simon Kirby‘s work, which I found remarkable. Kirby and colleagues setup an experiment, one that observed the evolution of an artificial language from a set of random terms to an ordered, naturally adapting system in ways that assured its reproduction. I didn’t know when Kirby was to publish his work, but lo and behold in this week’s issue of PNAS, I saw “Cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory: An experimental approach to the origins of structure in human language,” by Simon Kirby, Hannah Cornish, and Kenny Smith. The subjects were asked to play a game of Memory, by trying to recall the terms with the illustrations. Transmission Error & Measure of Structure versus the Number of Generations Clearly there’s some pattern forming. Transmission Error & Measure of Structure versus Number of Generations with Selection Like this: Like Loading...
14 Pangrams" A pangram, or holoalphabetic sentence, includes every letter of the alphabet at least once. The most challenging pangrams are the ones with the fewest letters. Here are a few of the best. 1. Waltz, bad nymph, for quick jigs vex. (28 letters) 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. Helen Davies, Marjorie Dorfman, Mary Fons, Deborah Hawkins, Martin Hintz, Linnea Lundgren, David Priess, Julia Clark Robinson, Paul Seaburn, Heidi Stevens, and Steve Theunissen English - StumbleUpon American Association for Applied Linguistics Linguistic evolution - EvoWiki From EvoWiki The evolution of languages, like that of religions, and unlike that of living organisms, is Lamarckian, not Darwinian. Languages evolve according to acquisition of inherited characteristics from parent to child. However, despite this basic difference between linguistic and biological evolution, there are many shared points: for example, linguistic speciation, just like biological, works on the group level (the level of society). It might at first thought seem impossible to do that, since speakers of most languages will borrow words almost indiscriminately from other languages unless discouraged by linguistic purism. Languages speciate when they are no longer mutually intelligible. As an example, English, German and Swedish share the following vowel correspondence: This correspondence stays when we examine older Germanic tongues: In contrast, vocabulary similarities broader than the core level are no pointer to common ancestry. For more, see the American Heritage Dictionary.