In his 2002 book Lost Languages, Andrew Robinson, then the literary editor of the London Times' higher-education supplement, declared that "successful archaeological decipherment has turned out to require ...
Jun 30, 2010
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(Phys.org) —A team of linguistics experts from the U.S., Great Britain and New Zealand has found evidence that suggests a core group of words used in a common language thousands of years ago has survived ...
May 07, 2013
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(PhysOrg.com) -- There are an estimated 6,500 languages in the world, with around fifty percent of them endangered and likely to cease to exist by 2100, but efforts are now being made to save them from extinction.
Dec 14, 2009
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(PhysOrg.com) -- On the surface, English, Japanese, and Kinande, a member of the Bantu family of languages spoken in the Democratic Republic of Congo, have little in common. It is not just that the vocabularies ...
Nov 20, 2009
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Linguists have thought for many years the length of words is related to the frequency of use, with short words used more often than long ones. Now researchers in the US have shown the length is more closely ...
Jan 25, 2011
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A Chinese semantic network with semantic (argument structure) annotation was built and investigated for finding its global statistical properties. The results show that semantic network is also small-world and scale-free ...
Aug 11, 2009
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Could the word for mother prove that Turkey was the birthplace of hundreds of languages as diverse as Hindi, Russian, Dutch, Albanian, Italian and English?
Aug 23, 2012
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Most people learn to count when they are children. Yet surprisingly, not all languages have words for numbers. A recent study published in the journal of Cognitive Science shows that a few tongues lack number words and as ...
Feb 21, 2012
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University of British Columbia and Berkeley researchers have used a sophisticated new computer system to quickly reconstruct protolanguages – the rudimentary ancient tongues from which modern languages evolved.
Feb 11, 2013
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Using advanced computer modeling and statistical analysis, a University of Texas at Austin linguistics professor has found that toddlers develop their own individual structures for using language that are ...
Oct 05, 2009
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A "hidden" language spoken by only about 1,000 people has been discovered in the remote northeast corner of India by researchers who at first thought they were documenting a dialect of the Aka culture, a tribal ...
Oct 05, 2010
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Published in Science, a new report from biologist Quentin D. Atkinson from the University of Auckland is sparking controversy among linguists. Atkinson has been analyzing the sounds of the many languages around ...
Apr 15, 2011
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People generally think that they are in full command of what they say. Historical linguist Nikolaus Ritt from the Department of English and American Studies at Universitat Wien (Austria), however, claims that it may actually ...
Aug 04, 2010
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In linguistic terms, a question is largely the re-ordering of a statement. Shuffle the words around, make a couple of other changes, and "John rode a horse" becomes "What did John ride?"
Mar 26, 2010
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(Phys.org) -- There is strong evidence to support the discovery of a new European language.
Jun 18, 2012
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