Tag Archives: Language and Languages

After listening to hundreds of hours of ape calls, a team of scientists say they have detected a hallmark of human language: the ability to put together strings of sounds to create new meanings. The provocative finding, published Thursday in the journal Science, drew praise from some scholars and skepticism from others. Federica Amici, a primatologist at the University of …

Scientists have long struggled to understand how human language evolved. Words and sentences don’t leave fossils behind for paleontologists to dig up. A genetic study published on Tuesday offers an important new clue. Researchers found that, between 250,000 and 500,000 years ago, a gene known as NOVA1 underwent a profound evolutionary change in our ancestors. When the scientists put the …

Cursing is coursing through society. Words once too blue to publicly utter have become increasingly commonplace. “Language is just part of the whole shift to a more casual lifestyle,” said Timothy Jay, a professor emeritus of psychology at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams, Mass. Dr. Jay has spent a career studying the use of profanity, from …

The English language is full of wonderful words, from “anemone” and “aurora” to “zenith” and “zodiac.” But these are special occasion words, sprinkled sparingly into writing and conversation. The words in heaviest rotation are short and mundane. And they follow a remarkable statistical rule, which is universal across human languages: The most common word, which in English is “the,” is …

In 1786, a British judge named William Jones noticed striking similarities between certain words in languages, such as Sanskrit and Latin, whose speakers were separated by thousands of miles. The languages must have “sprung from some common source,” he wrote. Later generations of linguists determined that Sanskrit and Latin belong to a huge family of so-called Indo-European languages. So do …

Parents and their children, or people who know each other well, often share some expression that is unique to them — a phrase or gesture that began by happenstance but gradually acquired a meaning that only they know. The same is true of Beryl, a chimpanzee living in Kibale National Park, in Uganda, and her young daughter, Lindsay. When Lindsay …

For Wynne, the buttons are not only entirely superfluous to the communication humans and dogs already have but also potentially a distraction from their natural barks and howls, their tail wags and tucks. “I actually think that having dogs press buttons runs the risk of obscuring dogs’ voices in the sense of dogs’ expressions of themselves,” Wynne said. Rossano disagrees …