A new study published in the journal Science Advances shows that Bantu-speaking communities in the Congo rainforest underwent a major population collapse from 1600 to 1400 years ago, probably due to a prolonged disease epidemic, ...
Archaeology
Feb 12, 2021
2
189
Multi-disciplinary researchers at The University of Manchester have helped develop a powerful physics-based tool to map the pace of language development and human innovation over thousands of years—even stretching into ...
Social Sciences
Jan 27, 2021
0
667
Every language has cases in which two or more concepts are expressed by the same word, such as the English word "fly," which refers to both the act of flying and to the insect. By comparing patterns in these cases, which ...
Social Sciences
Jan 13, 2020
1
500
Two French researchers from the CNRS and Ecole nationale des chartes have disproved the theory holding that Corneille was Molière's ghostwriter—a popular and century-old theory defended by some academics and writers. According ...
Other
Nov 27, 2019
0
85
Even though they are not needed to make the specific sounds, parts of Mandarin Chinese speakers' faces—their eyebrows and lips—mimic the rising and falling pitch that distinguishes one word spelled exactly the same from ...
Social Sciences
Sep 24, 2019
0
108
The Sino-Tibetan language family includes early literary languages, such as Chinese, Tibetan and Burmese, and is represented by more than 400 modern languages spoken in China, India, Burma, and Nepal. It is one of the most ...
Social Sciences
May 6, 2019
0
452
An international team of researchers has combined archaeological, historical and linguistic data with genetic information from over 700 newly analyzed individuals to construct a more detailed picture of the history of inner ...
Evolution
Apr 29, 2019
0
123
Gestures and visual animations can help reveal the cognitive origins of meaning, indicating that our minds can assign a linguistic structure to new informational content "on the fly"—even if it is not linguistic in nature.
Social Sciences
Apr 25, 2019
1
341
A team of researchers with members from the U.K., Switzerland and Spain has found that chimpanzees use communication gestures in ways that follow human linguistic rules. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal ...
An international team of researchers, members of the Cross-Linguistic Data Formats Initiative (CLDF) led by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, has proposed new guidelines on cross-linguistic data formats ...
Social Sciences
Oct 16, 2018
0
48
