Beyond words: The 200-year-old hidden languages of dating

From Regency-era "fan flirting" to online dating, we decipher the timeless looks, signs and gifts that signal secret love.

courtship portraits are, actually, back

Frontiers | Swearing as a Response to Pain: Assessing Hypoalgesic Effects of Novel “Swear” Words

Previous research showing swearing alleviates pain is extended by addressing emotion arousal and distraction as possible mechanisms. We assessed the effects ...

The Emoji Tongue

If 😂 was a word, would that make emoji a language?

why AI language models like chatGPT can’t understand flowers

a study by ohio state university investigates whether large language models can represent human concepts without physically experiencing them.

Did Baby Talk Give Rise to Language?

The way that human adults talk to young children is unique among primates, a new study found. That might be one secret to our species’ grasp of language.

Can You Use ChatGPT To Learn a New Language?

Can't find a human to practice a language with? I've been there. Here's why most of my interaction with ChatGPT is in other languages.

Why alien languages could be far stranger than we imagine | Aeon Essays

Imagining how aliens might communicate prepares us for first contact and illuminates the nature of our own languages

A language can be thought to contain four levels, corresponding to four features of human languages: sign, structure, semantics and pragmatics

signs: things that we produce, observe or exchange.

Lost and Found: The Unexpected Journey of the MingKwai Typewriter | Made in China Journal

It began as an innocuous inquiry on Facebook. Nelson Felix, a resident of New York State, posted in the group ‘What’s My Typewriter Worth?’ about a curious find he made while clearing out the basement of his wife’s grandfather. He shared a few photos. The keys on the typewriter…

10 Untranslatable Japanese Words You Need To Know

Explore the fascinating world of untranslatable Japanese that reveal unique aspects of Japanese culture and daily life.

Do-All-Human-Languages-Have-Basic-Grammar-Rules/

Huh? The valuable role of interjections

Utterances like um, wow and mm-hmm aren’t garbage — they keep conversations flowing

To Make Language Models Work Better, Researchers Sidestep Language | Quanta Magazine

We insist that large language models repeatedly translate their mathematical processes into words. There may be a better way.

This reliance on filtering concepts through the sieve of language can also result in a loss of information

deep neural networks that allow language models to continue thinking in mathematical spaces before producing any text.

Why Most Ancient Civilizations Had No Word for the Color Blue

In an old Zen story, two monks argue over whether a flag is waving or whether it’s the wind that waves.

How Chinese Characters Work: The Evolution of a Three-Millennia-Old Writing System

Contrary to somewhat popular belief, Chinese characters aren't just little pictures. In fact, most of them aren't pictures at all.

Where Does Meaning Live in a Sentence? Math Might Tell Us. | Quanta Magazine

The mathematician Tai-Danae Bradley is using category theory to try to understand both human and AI-generated language.

Her lens is category theory,

A category consists of some objects, together with relationships between them, called morphisms.

How the brain decodes changes in the pitch of our speech to shape meaning

Bonobos May Combine Words In Ways Previously Thought Unique To Humans - Slashdot

A new study shows bonobos can combine vocal calls in ways that mirror human language, producing phrases with meanings beyond the sum of individual sounds. "Human language is not as unique as we thought," said Dr Melissa Berthet, the first author of the research from the…

Bonobos’ calls may be the closest thing to animal language we’ve seen

300 aspects of each call were cataloged, letting researchers estimate meaning.

Xenolinguistics—the Study of Alien Languages—Helps to Reveal Why All Beings Communicate

Studying how extraterrestrials might communicate could help prepare for first contact and also hint at the point of language itself

What is METEOR score? - Dataconomy

METEOR Score is a metric used to evaluate the quality of machine translation based on precision, recall, word alignment, and linguistic flexibility.

What is stemming? - Dataconomy

Stemming is the linguistic process of reducing words to their base form, ignoring prefixes and suffixes, to enhance clarity and information retrieval.

The Mystery of the World's Oldest Writing System Remained Unsolved Until Four Competitive Scholars Raced to Decipher It

In the 1850s, cuneiform was just a series of baffling scratches on clay, waiting to spill the secrets of the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia

The Strange Power of Laughter

An anthropologist explores laughter as a far more complex phenomenon than simple delight—reflecting on its surprising power to disturb and disrupt.

Linguists Point to Expressions of Pain as a Possible Universal Language

Linguists think that the words that we use to express pain might tell us something about our shared biology and the commonality of language.

Ten Thousand Years - 99% Invisible

In 1990, the federal government invited a group of geologists, linguists, astrophysicists, architects, artists, and writers to the New Mexico desert, to visit the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. They would be there on assignment. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) is the…

Can a Comma Solve a Crime? — The Dial

How forensic linguists use grammar, syntax and vocabulary to help crack cold cases.

Evidence of oldest known alphabetic writing unearthed in ancient Syrian city

Findings suggest alphabetic writing may be some 500 years older than other discoveries

Sentence structure for writers: understanding weight and clarity [extract]

Some sentences just sound awkward. In order to ensure clarity, writers need to consider more than just grammar: weight is equally important. In the following extract from Making Sense, acclaimed linguist David Crystal shows how sentence length (and weight) affects writing…

What both these examples show is the importance of length, or weight.

Both illustrate the principle of end-weight.

Tackling the Impossibility—and Necessity—of Counting the World’s Languages

A language scientist delves into historic and current efforts to catalog the planet’s 7,000-plus languages, uncovering colorful tales.

'It's a unique language spoken by two people': The twins who created their own language

Up to 50% of twins develop their own communication pattern with one another. Most lose it over time, but for the Youlden twins it has become a normal way of communicating.

Never Say Wolf

How taboo language turned the wolf into a monster.

Why do we say “like,” like, all the time?

In defense of the supremely useful and unfairly maligned word.

You Don’t Need Words to Think

Brain studies show that language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

Hidden Patterns in Folk Songs Reveal How Music Evolved

Songs and speech across cultures suggest music developed similar features around the world

The Birth of Cool

Being cool is hard. Staying cool is harder. It’s an elusive quality, in part because it’s an elusive word with layers of nuanced meaning that peel off...

Book Review: You Talking to Me? How Human Language Evolved

Prehistory professor Steven Mithen’s “The Language Puzzle” explores the mysteries of when and how we began to speak.

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/evolutionary-syntax-9780198736554

What a Linguist Hears When Biden Speaks

Don’t fixate on a few shaggy phrases. There’s something bigger going on.

Wild elephants may have names that other elephants use to call them

Research on the rumbles of wild elephants suggest that these animals address each other with unique, name-like vocalizations. (Story aired on All Things Considered on June 10, 2024.)

The 7-38-55 rule: Debunking the golden ratio of conversation

The 7-38-55 rule claims that the majority of a conversation’s meaning is found in tone and body language. The truth is much more complicated.

The Long Linguistic Journey to ‘Dagnabbit’

This piece of pseudo-profanity is what’s known as a taboo deformation—a word we say when we don’t want to say the word.

15 Fascinating Linguistics Terms You Didn’t Learn in School

Your sixth-grade language arts class probably didn't cover kangaroo words and snowclones.

The Unusual Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist

A new sign language is developing in the Negev desert and it’s catching linguists off-guard.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang

My Synesthesia Transforms Speech into Text I ‘See’ in My Head

From the time I learned to read, I have experienced a form of mental closed-captioning called ticker-tape synesthesia

What's the Fastest Language in the World?

Theansweriscomplicated.

14 Secret Code Words You Might Want to Know

Some words, when used in specific situations, have deeper meanings than you realize: They’re codes to alert those in the know while keeping others in the dark.

Speech and Language Processing

“Dune” and the Delicate Art of Making Fictional Languages

The alien language spoken in Frank Herbert’s novels carries traces of Arabic. Why has that influence been scrubbed from the films?

How Being Bilingual Helps Your Brain (Even If You Learn a New Language in A

There was a time in America, not so very long ago, when conventional wisdom discouraged immigrants from speaking the language of the old country at home. In fact, 'it used to be thought that being bilingual was a bad thing, that it would confuse or hold people back, especially…