Words for emotions like "anger" and "fear" vary in meaning across language families. Researchers have now compared colexifications of emotion words—cases where one word signifies multiple semantically related concepts. ...
Social Sciences
Dec 19, 2019
2
822
A new study indicates that one of the largest of the Indigenous language families in Latin America originated in the sixth century BCE in the basin of the Rio Tapajós and Rio Xingu, near the present-day city of Santarém ...
Archaeology
Jun 15, 2023
0
544
The words different cultures use to describe family members have revealed some intriguing insights—including why in Balto-Slavic languages there is a complicated relationship between in-laws and weasels.
Social Sciences
May 24, 2023
0
30
Around the world, more than 7,000 languages are spoken, most of them by small populations of speakers in the tropics. Papua New Guinea (PNG), where nine million people speak 850 languages, is the most linguistically diverse ...
Social Sciences
Jun 3, 2021
0
8
The 'missing link' that helped our ancestors to begin communicating with each other through language may have been iconic sounds, rather than charades-like gestures—giving rise to the unique human power to coin new words ...
Other
May 12, 2021
0
3096
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
A small team of researchers affiliated with several institutions across China has conducted an in-depth study of the Sino-Tibetan language family and has concluded that it likely originated in present-day northern China. ...
Scientists have further evidence that an ancient family of languages spread across most of the Australian continent over the last 6000 years, rapidly replacing pre-existing languages.
Social Sciences
Mar 13, 2018
1
41
How do language families evolve over many thousands of years? How stable over time are structural features of languages? Researchers Dan Dediu and Stephen Levinson from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen ...
Social Sciences
Sep 20, 2012
8
0
Not only do we humans enjoy talking -- and talking a lot -- we also do so in very different ways: about 6,000 languages are spoken today worldwide. How this wealth of expression developed, however, largely remains a mystery. ...
Social Sciences
Apr 14, 2011
3
0
