(PhysOrg.com) -- Adding new words to an existing language, or dropping old ones is something people have always done. As new things or ideas are discovered, new words crop up to describe them. But now, in the digital age, ...
The origins of language is, in some ways, more complicated to study than the origins of other biological traits because language does not fossilize or leave behind physical traces the way that bones and tissues do. However, ...
The universal online dictionary Kamusi has just added 1.2 million terms from several databases in its quest to translate all the meanings of every word in all the world's languages. Three African languages and 200,000 words ...
Software
Sep 18, 2015
0
138
(PhysOrg.com) -- Why do words sound the way they do? For over a century, it has been a central tenet of linguistic theory that there is a completely arbitrary relationship between how a word sounds and what it means.
Other
Sep 13, 2011
3
2
The words people use on social media can reveal hidden meaning to those who know where to look.
Computer Sciences
Sep 29, 2015
0
1164
Why did language evolve? While the answer might seem obvious -- as a way for individuals to exchange information -- linguists and other students of communication have debated this question for years. Many prominent linguists, ...
Social Sciences
Jan 19, 2012
8
0
(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 to this day. In ...
In a study that shatters a cornerstone concept in linguistics, an analysis of nearly two-thirds of the world's languages shows that humans tend to use the same sounds for common objects and ideas, no matter what language ...
Social Sciences
Sep 12, 2016
11
397
(Phys.org)—Geneticist Theo Sanderson has written a simple text editor that allows a writer to use only words from a list of the 1000 ("ten hundred" since "thousand" isn't on the list) most commonly used words in the English ...
(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 ...
