anthropological linguistics
noun
the study of language in relation to culture, including the recording and analysis of the languages of nonliterate societies.
RELATED CONTENT
How do computers help decode inscrutable ciphers?Back in the 1940s, mathematician Warren Weaver made an audacious suggestion: what if translation was not a feat of literary theory and linguistics, but one of cryptography? Weaver suggested treating a foreign text as if it were a code to be broken. (This theory was the early basis of machine translation, a subfield of computational linguistics.) This metaphor of foreign language as code means that statistics …
Where and when did language begin? A remarkable new study may have the answerThe origin of spoken language has stumped linguistics dating as far back as the Twenty-sixth dynasty in Egypt and the first recorded language experiment conducted by a Pharaoh named Psammetichus I. While it is widely understood that our ability to communicate through speech sets us apart from other animals, language experts, historians and scientists can only hypothesize how, where and when it all began. Some new …
Nearby words
- anthropoid pelvis,
- anthropoidea,
- anthropol.,
- anthropolatry,
- anthropological,
- anthropologist,
- anthropology,
- anthropometer,
- anthropometric,
- anthropometrics
Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2019