We are always being reminded that Darwin used the "tree of language" to come up with his "tree of life" idea; others might refer to it as evolution, natural selection, or survival of the fit.
When languages collide, which survives?
Nov 2023, phys.org
Language is a meme -
Our findings lead to the conclusion that the more mixing that occurs between different social groups, the more challenging it becomes for language varieties to coexist within the same society," said author Pablo Rosillo-Rodes. "The dynamics of the system has a subtle dependence on both the preferences of the speakers and the coupling between different communities."
Existing work from sociolinguistics showed that the social prestige of a language was considered the main factor leading to its extinction or survival. Insights in language contact from these previous studies, in combination with sociolinguistic studies on language ideologies, were used by the researchers to present a comprehensive picture of how language varieties are distributed in societies.
The team chose a quantitative approach based on a society in which only one language with two varieties, the standard and the vernacular, existed. The resulting mathematical model can predict the conditions that allow for the coexistence of different languages, presenting a comprehensive view of how language varieties are distributed within societies.
via University of the Balearic Islands in Spain: Pablo Rosillo-Rodes et al, Modeling language ideologies for the dynamics of languages in contact, Chaos An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science (2023). DOI: 10.1063/5.0166636
Rare pre- and post-operative recordings show what happens after the brain loses a hub
Dec 2023, phys.org
This is the first direct recordings of the human brain in the minutes before and after a brain hub crucial for language meaning was surgically disconnected, and was conducted during surgical treatment of two patients with epilepsy.
The innovation in this study was that the neurosurgery team was able to safely complete the procedure with the recording electrodes left in place or replaced to the same location after the procedure.
"The rapid impact on the speech and language processing regions well removed from the surgical treatment site was surprising, but what was even more surprising was how the brain was working to compensate"
The findings disprove theories challenging the necessity of specific brain hubs by showing that the hub was important to maintain normal brain processing in language. (Don't forget the girl who could smell despite having
no olfactory cortex.)
via University of Iowa: Zsuzsanna Kocsis et al, Immediate neural impact and incomplete compensation after semantic hub disconnection, Nature Communications (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-42088-7
Study suggests existence of a universal, nonverbal communication system
Dec 2023, phys.org
Hints of the presence of a universal system of communication:
The children either spoke English or Turkish. They were asked to use their hands to act out specific actions, such as running into a house.
They found that when the children spoke and gestured at the same time, their gesture followed the conventions of their language, with clear differences between the gestures of the Turkish and English speakers.
When the children used gestures without speaking, however, their gestures were remarkably similar.
via Georgia State, University of Chicago, and Cornell: Şeyda Özçalışkan et al, What the development of gesture with and without speech can tell us about the effect of language on thought, Language and Cognition (2023). DOI: 10.1017/langcog.2023.34
Survival of the fittest: Words like 'sex' and 'fight' are most likely to stand the test of time
Jan 2024, phys.org
Words with the strongest lasting power are:
- Words acquired earlier in life
- Words associated with things people can see or imagine, termed "concrete" words. For example, "cat" is more concrete than "animal," which is more concrete than "organism"
- Words that are more arousing, including words like "sex" and "fight"
Early acquisition, concreteness, and arousal give linguistic information a selective advantage.
via University of Warwick: Ying Li et al, How cognitive selection affects language change, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2023). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2220898120
Faulty machine translations litter the web
Jan 2024, phys.org
Eat This
They state, "Machine generated, multi-way parallel translations not only dominate the total amount of translated content on the web in lower resource languages, it also constitutes a large fraction of the total web content in those languages."
Such content, they suggested, tends to be simpler, lower-quality passages "likely produced to generate ad revenue." Since fluency and accuracy are lower for machine-trained material, numerous translations will lead to even less accurate content and increase the odds of AI hallucination.
Medical prescription translation tool for Armenian speakers:
English: "You can take over-the-counter ibuprofen as needed for pain."
Translation to Armenian: "You may take anti-tank missile as much as you need for pain."
Regions under-represented on the web such as African nations and other countries with more obscure languages will face greater challenges in establishing reliable large language models.
via Amazon Web Services Artificial Intelligence Lab and the University of California Santa Barbara, and also a Vice Motherboard interview w the scientist: Brian Thompson et al, A Shocking Amount of the Web is Machine Translated: Insights from Multi-Way Parallelism, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2401.05749
Can any English word be turned into a synonym for “drunk”? Not all, but many can
Feb 2024, Ars Technica
Drunkonyms - like the words wasted, smashed, hammered, obliterated
Because the British are far better at this game than the Americans, also see - wellied, trousered, ratarsed, "I was utterly gazeboed," or "I am going to get totally and utterly carparked." (these come from the British comedian Michael McIntyre in a bit concerning the many slang terms posh British people use to describe being drunk)
They found the basic structure is common - combining "be" or "get" with an intensifying adverb ("totally") and a random word ending in "-ed."
Bonuses:
- The authors include an appendix of 546 English synonyms for "drunk"
- Benjamin Franklin penned the Drinker's Dictionary in 1737, with 288 words https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-02-02-0029
- Dictionary of American Slang by 1975 had 353 synonyms
- Linguist Harry Levine in 1981 noted 900 terms https://qcpages.qc.cuny.edu/~hlevine/Vocabulary-of-Drunkenness-Levine.pdf
- P.G. Wodehouse's books especially 'Wooster's World,' a condensed version of The Millennium Wodehouse Concordance he produced with Tony Ring, includes them throughout with in each case referring you to the next term, if you follow the trail you end up back at the first one with no meaning every having being given. For example: Awash: see blotto. Blotto: see boiled. Boiled: see fried. Fried to the tonsils: see full to the back teeth. Full to the back teeth: see lathered. And so on. -via user Stendec
via Chemnitz University of Technology and Peter Uhrig of FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg: Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association, 2024. DOI: 10.1515/gcla-2023-0007
Can't forget: The Alcohol Language Corpus (of drunk speech) aka Drunken John
Between 2007 and 2009, linguistic researchers from the Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Institute of Legal Medicine in Munich in Germany convinced 162 men and women to get drunk (and talk Drunken John into a voice recorder).
Isolated for six months, scientists in Antarctica began to develop their own accent
Feb 2024, phys.org
"They say it is quicker to get to someone on the International Space Station than it is to medically evacuate someone from Antarctica in the winter"
- Over the 26-week winter of near perpetual darkness and harsh weather, Clark and his fellow inhabitants at Rothera would work, eat and socialise together with barely any contact with home. Satellite phone calls are expensive and so used sparingly. With just each other for company and limited entertainment on the base, the "winterers", as they are known, would chat to each other – a lot.
- Their common language was English, sprinkled with slang words unique to the Antarctic research stations.
- 10-minute recordings every few weeks; sit in front of a microphone and repeat the same 29 words as they appeared on a computer screen.
- They found some of the vowels had shifted.
- One of those changes was the "ou" sound in words such as "flow" and "sew" that shifted towards the front of the vocal tract.
- They also saw some of the winterers beginning to converge in the way they pronounced three other vowels.
"When we speak to each other, we memorise that speech and then that has an influence on our own speech production," says Harrington. In effect, we transmit and infect one another with pronunciations every time we interact with others. Over time, if we have regular and prolonged contact with someone, we can start to pick up their sounds.
via Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich: Phonetic change in an Antarctic winter
Jonathan Harrington et al. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 146, 3327–3332 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1121/1.5130709
AI analysis of social media language predicts depression severity for white Americans, but not Black Americans
Mar 2024, phys.org
Remember the point here is not that an entire subroup of the population doesn't get depressed, it's that models don't work for those people, so they need to be tuned better.
The study, which recruited 868 consenting participants who identified themselves as Black or white, demonstrated that models trained on Facebook language used by white participants with self-reported depression showed strong predictive performance when tested on the white participants. However, when the same models were trained on Facebook language from Black participants, they performed poorly when tested on the Black participants, and showed only slightly better performance when tested on white participants.
While depression severity was associated with increased use of first-person singular pronouns ("I," "me," "my") in white participants, this correlation was absent in Black participants. Additionally, white people used more language to describe feelings of belongingness ("weirdo," "creep"), self-criticism ("mess," "wreck"), being an anxious-outsider ("terrified," "misunderstood"), self-deprecation ("worthless," "crap"), and despair ("begging," "hollow") as depression severity increased, but there was no such correlation for Black people. For decades, clinicians have been aware of demographic differences in how people express depressive symptoms, and this study now demonstrates how this can play out in social media.
via University of Pennsylvania and the National Institute on Drug Abuse: Sunny Rai et al, Key language markers of depression on social media depend on race, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2319837121
First languages of North America traced back to two very different language groups from Siberia
Apr 2024, phys.org
Nichols' techniques involve the use of linguistic typology, a field that involves comparing languages and organizing them based on shared criteria. To learn more about early North American languages, she compiled lists of language characteristics and applied them to all known languages. She then scored each of the languages based on the revealed qualities. This allowed her to compare the languages as a way to find resemblances among them and spot patterns.
Nichols found that she could trace the languages spoken in early North America back to just two lineages, both of which originated in Siberia. They came, she notes, with the people who made their way across land bridges during Ice Age glaciation events.
via University of California Berkeley: Johanna Nichols, Founder effects identify languages of the earliest Americans, American Journal of Biological Anthropology (2024). DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.24923
