What we did | Mapping the origin of Indo-European Step 1 – Building a database of cognates Cognates are similar words shared across languages and taken to indicate relatedness via common ancestry. To be diagnosed as cognate the words must have similar meaning and, most importantly, show systematic sound correspondences indicating a common origin. For example, the English word five has cognates in German (funf), Swedish (fem) and Dutch (vijf), reflecting descent from proto-Germanic (*fimf). The table below shows an example dataset with six languages and cognate sets colour coded across four meanings. We compiled a database of word forms and cognacy judgements across 103 Indo-European languages (including 20 ancient languages) and 207 meanings. Step 2 – Location data To work out where Indo-European languages have come from, we use information about where the contemporary languages in our sample are spoken today and where the ancient languages are thought to have been spoken. Figure: Map showing language locations.
TeacherTube - Teach the World Babbler birds could shed light on human language Language: The chestnut-crowned babbler. Photo: Supplied Move over, parrots. There's another bird with some impressive "language" skills: the chestnut-crowned babbler, which lives in the Australian outback. Scientists studying the social birds have discovered that they can rearrange meaningless sounds in their calls to form different, meaningful messages. The findings, described in the journal PLOS Biology, may shed light on how the features of human language came to be. "Our results indicate that the capacity to rearrange meaningless sounds in order to create new signals occurs outside of humans," the authors wrote. It could hint at "a potential early step towards the generative phonemic system of human language", they added. One of the fundamental abilities that sets humans apart from other animals is language - the ability to string meaningless sounds together to communicate complex ideas to one another. Take the sounds A, T and B. Los Angeles Times
ePals Global Community Project: Literature Circles Students work in small groups reading a novel and assuming various roles in the Literature Circle in order to demonstrate their understanding of the novel and share... Project: Email Exchange Students will engage in an ePals email exchange, practicing the skills of collaboration and communication while building friendships and learning about the daily lives and cultures of others around the world. Collaborative Detective Story Students will compose a collaborative narrative short story while creating international friendships and a great story to share. 21st Century Learning Tools Project When students are a part of an online collaborative learning community, powerful learning takes place. Monster Writing Project Students attempt to recreate the monsters based on the description they received from other ePals. Project: Theme Detectives Is it just a funny talking spider or do his antics serve a deeper cultural purpose? Project: Biographies: Explorer Expedition
Playful Illustrations Make It Easy to Learn Chinese. By ShaoLan Hsueh. Editable PowerPoint Newspapers PowerPoint Template Views 925,852 Filed under Educational , Editor's pick, english, newspaper, resource, school We have just updated our popular editable PowerPoint newspapers. With these you can create your own news headlines, articles and insert your own pictures. Following a couple of requests, we have updated these so that you can now add in your own newspaper name. These spoof newspaper templates could have many uses, including college and school projects and fun cards to send news to your friends and family. The template is also available in portrait (vertical) format and our latest template in the series, the Magazine PowerPoint. If you liked this PowerPoint Template we would appreciate you liking it on FaceBook or Tweeting it. 13 October 2014 Template number 00253 Filed under Educational , Editor's pick , english , newspaper , resource , school You can browse all of our PowerPoint templates or select them by category or colour or by tag.
Elephants distinguish age, gender, and ethnicity in human voices Last week, we learned how elephants have a call that means “HUMAN”, used to alert other elephants to potential danger. This week, scientists reveal that elephants seem to know which humans might pose an actual threat: they can actually distinguish between humans’ age, gender, and ethnicity from just acoustic cues. Free-ranging elephants often encounter the cattle-herding Maasai people, who are semi-nomadic and sometimes kill elephants over conflicts over water or land for grazing. To further tease this out, a team led by Karen McComb and Graeme Shannon from the University of Sussex recorded Maasai men, women, and boys, along with men of the nearby, crop-farming Kamba people. The elephants, they found, were nearly twice as likely to engage in defensive behavior -- such as bunching into a group around their young or raising their trunks to do some investigative smelling -- during playbacks of Maasai men than they would Kamba men, suggesting that they view the Kamba as non-threatening.
Printable Graphic Organizers for Teachers, Grades K-12 Highlights Halloween Happy Halloween! Students love this fall holiday; take advantage of it! You'll find everything from costume patterns and printable Halloween masks to counting activities and vocabulary lessons. 2016 Presidential Elections Election season is here! October Calendar of Events October is full of events that you can incorporate into your standard curriculum!
ToK- language-Why H is the most contentious letter in the alphabet Is it 'aitch' or 'haitch'? Photograph: Alamy The alphabet is something not to be argued with: there are 26 letters in as fixed a sequence as the numbers 1-26; once learned in order and for the "sounds they make", you have the key to reading and the key to the way the world is classified. Or perhaps not. Actually, in the course of writing my book about the history of the letters we use, Alphabetical, I discovered that the alphabet is far from neutral. Debates about power and class surround every letter, and H is the most contentious of all. In Britain, H owes its name to the Normans, who brought their letter "hache" with them in 1066. Perhaps the letter H was doomed from the start: given that the sound we associate with H is so slight (a little outbreath), there has been debate since at least AD 500 whether it was a true letter or not. The world is full of people laying down the law about the "correct" choice: is it "a hotel" or "an otel"; is it "a historian" or "an historian"?
How speaking multiple languages benefits the brain - Mia Nacamulli Amazed by what you have learned about having a bilingual brain? Then, start learning another language now! This website has tons of free lessons, games and quizzes to get you started! Speaking more than one language is like exercise for the brain? Love all this brain talk? Want to learn another language (or two or three or...)? 20 words that once meant something very different Words change meaning over time in ways that might surprise you. We sometimes notice words changing meaning under our noses (e.g., unique coming to mean “very unusual” rather than “one of a kind”) — and it can be disconcerting. How in the world are we all going to communicate effectively if we allow words to shift in meaning like that? The good news: History tells us that we’ll be fine. Words have been changing meaning — sometimes radically — as long as there have been words and speakers to speak them. Here is just a small sampling of words you may not have realized didn’t always mean what they mean today. Nice: This word used to mean “silly, foolish, simple.” We’re human. Watch Anne Curzan’s TED Talk to find out what makes a word “real”.
justenglish Paul V. Hartman (The Capitalized syllable gets the emphasis) alacrity a-LACK-ra-tee cheerful willingness and promptnessanathema a-NATH-a-ma a thing or person cursed, banned, or reviledanodyne AN-a-dine not likely to cause offence or disagreement and somewhat dull//anything that sooths or comfortsaphorism AFF-oar-ism a short, witty saying or concise principleapostate ah-POSS-tate (also: apostasy) person who has left the fold or deserted the faith.arrogate ARROW-gate to make an unreasonable claimatavistic at-a-VIS-tic reverting to a primitive typeavuncular a-VUNC-you-lar “like an uncle”; benevolent bathos BATH-ose an anticlimaxbereft ba-REFT to be deprived of something valuable “He was bereft of reason.” cynosure SIGH-na-shore (from the Greek: “dog’s tail”) center of attention; point to which all eyes are drawn. dilettante DILL-ah-tent 1. having superficial/amateurish interest in a branch of knowledge; 2. a connoisseur or lover of the fine arts Click to read: Like this: Related
Mapping Metaphor: Home This is What Michael Jackson Sounds Like in Quechua Even the youngs think Quechua is cool. After the language was translated for a book, a song, and given a shoutout by a fútbolero, we started thinking that Quechua was having a sort of moment. Perhaps the biggest sign of this is that a 14-year-old girl named Renata Flores sang a Quechua version of Michael Jackson’s “The Way You Make Me Feel.” The Ayacuchana sings the tune at the Vilcashuamán ruins, as guitars and a Peruvian cajón play. According to La Republica, the video is part of the Asociación Cultural SURCA, which works to get the youth to learn the importance of Quechua.