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.
The Dynamic Duo: Music and Language Learning Join Forces Music and language learning is the best combo since peanut butter and jelly. I boosted my Spanish to fluency by listening to Enrique Iglesias, Marc Anthony and Shakira at full blast. I got truly passionate about Portuguese after discovering Joao Gilberto. True story. If only I knew sooner just how scientific my off-key singing and salsa dancing actually is! As it turns out, there’s a reason why so many language learners swear by studying with music. Whether it’s foreign music in the background to get you in the learning “zone,” music and lyrics paired for active learning or just dance tracks played at full volume for fun times, music can supercharge your learning. What Science Is Telling Us About Music and Language Music Improves Overall Brain Power Children who’ve been musically trained start out in life with tons of great advantages. If you can play or are learning to play an instrument, more power to you. Music Puts the Memory Pedal to the Metal According to Dr. Music Makes Us Happy FluentU
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
The 10 Best Sites for Taking Free English Courses Online Wake up! Turn on your computer. Now you’re ready to take a college-level English course. You don’t need to change out of your pajamas. You don’t even need to get out of bed. Don’t worry, it won’t cost you anything. All you need is an internet connection, a little time and the desire to learn. What? Well, you might already know that lots of colleges have online courses. They can be expensive, though, and often take a lot of time. But a different kind of learning is becoming popular. It’s called MOOC. What’s an MOOC? MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Course. These courses are a fantastic way to take a real class taught by a real teacher, but without having to actually go to a university. Millions of people are using MOOCs now. Why Take an MOOC? There are many benefits to taking an open online course! It’s free! MOOCs are a pretty new idea, but already there are a lot of places you can find them online. Another online option for English learning is FluentU. Alison This is the one that started it all.
Playful Illustrations Make It Easy to Learn Chinese. By ShaoLan Hsueh. teatalk 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.
TeacherTube - Teach the World 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"?
blubbr - Play & create video trivia games 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...)? Free Technology for Teachers 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”.
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