Mathematicians at the University of Vermont have been meddling in a field very far from boring numbers. Earlier this month, they officially declared the English language “optimistic” based on a careful analysis that combined statistics and subtle human evaluation. The researchers, led by assistant professor Chris Danforth, aggregated texts from Twitter,
Last week, we stumbled upon this article from the New York Times’ Frugal Traveler about a language hidden in rural Portugal. In the northeast corner of Portugal, there is a tiny county called Miranda do Douro and in Miranda do Douro many inhabitants do not speak Portuguese, but rather its distant cousin, Mirandese. This region is geographically divided from the rest of Portugal by two …
The popular American sitcom, Modern Family once featured a swearing toddler in an episode. It was not a “fleeting expletive.” The show intentionally included a cursing two-year and bleeped out all swear words. When the show premiered, the New York Times wrote about how accurately it reflected contemporary American families, and that the storylines seemed to be an accurate portrait of what many parents go through. …
Have you ever dreamed of being able to speak dozens of languages? A new book, Babel No More by journalist Michael Erard, traces the history of people who can do just that: hyperpolyglots, people who speak 11 or more languages. Obviously, hyperpolyglotism is a trained skill. No one just wakes up speaking multiple languages, but there may be factors that make it easier. As Erard …
Tonight’s meteor shower has an anachronistic name. It was originally named after the constellation Quadrans Muralis, discovered by Jerome Lalande in 1795. Well, “discover” may be the wrong word. Today, the International Astronomical Union no longer recognizes this constellation, rather the stars that were a part of it are now considered to be parts of other, more widely recognized constellations. Lalande named the constellation “Quadrans Muralis” after …
In English class, your grade doesn’t differentiate between how large your vocabulary is and how well you write a sentence. But recent research shows that your brain does! This evidence may mean that increasing your vocabulary won’t necessarily influence fluency when learning a new language. Two parts of the brain, Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, play a large part in processing language. Broca’s area has been linked …
There are essentially two ways to pick a “word of the year.” One common approach is to select from words whose common usage reflects some quality of the year past. Expect to see occupy, winning, etc., on many selections this December. Another way involves actually using the dictionary. Is there a word that captures the character of 2011, regardless of its popularity or ubiquity? In …
Recently, we looked up the etymology of the word occupy. We found an unexpected obsolete definition. The term occupy formerly meant something very different than its current common meaning. From the early 1500s to the 1800s, occupy was used to refer to sexual relations, as in “to occupy a woman” as defined in the Lexicon Balatronicum in 1811. When occupy was used in that sense, …
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 …
Though neurology has made great strides in the past two decades, the brain is still the least understood organ in the body. How does it make thoughts? Even though research has not yet answered that question, a few intrepid scientists think that we will soon be able to communicate with machines using only our minds. A recent New York Times article explains that this ambitious …
Wherever we go on the internet, we encounter CAPTCHAs, those twisted words that block or enable entries on websites. Need to post an ad on Craigslist or log into your email from a new device? You may meet a CAPTCHA. Want to comment on an article or blog post? CAPTCHA. So, why do we have them? How do CAPTCHAs work? CAPTCHAs were invented to block …
We have all heard how differently people in London, New York, or Baton Rouge speak English, but are those different speakers still fluent in English? Where does accent stop and fluency begin? What does fluency mean? Fluency is defined as “being able to speak and write quickly or easily in a given language.” It comes from the Latin word fluentem meaning “to flow.” What does accent mean? …
