Tag Archives: language

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Backing up languages

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History may only just be beginning, but we already have a lot of data stashed away as a species, and as we know, it’s always good practice to back it up.

But if you’re thinking in terms of centuries or millennia, it might also be a good idea to record information about our languages so that future historians won’t have to contend with undecipherable writings, like Rongorongo, due to linguistic drift.

The Long Now Foundation has created a modern day Rosetta Stone to help solve this problem, here is a description from Kevin Kelly’s website:

One side of the disk contains a graphic teaser. The design shows headlines in the eight major languages of the world today spiraling inward in ever-decreasing size till it becomes so small you have trouble reading it, yet the text goes on getting smaller. The sentences announce: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.”

This graphic side of the disk is pure titanium. A black oxide coating has been added to the surface. The text is etched into that, revealing the whiter titanium. This bold sign board is needed because the pages of genesis which are etched on the mirror-like opposite side of the disk are nearly invisible.

This business side of the disk is pure nickel. Picking it up you would not be aware there were 13,500 pages of linguistic gold hiding on it. The nickel is deposited on an etched silicon disk. In effect the Rosetta disk is a nickel cast of a micro-etch silicon mold. When the disk is held at the right angle the grid array of the pages form a slight diffraction rainbow. You need a 750-power optical microscope to read the pages.

Kelly’s description of the project is fascinating, and it seems like a wonderful project, both in practical terms and in artistic terms.

[story via Slashdot]

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Maybe Neanderthals could speak after all

skullsAnthropologists have long disagreed on the timing of the emergence of language in our hominid ancestors, and the results of recent research may reignite that debate. CT scans of a 530,000-year-old Homo heidelbergensis skull show that its ear canals are sensitive at 2kHz to 4kHz – the same crucial information-rich frequency range that we modern humans are attuned to – suggesting a much earlier emergence of language than commonly accepted. [via SlashDot] [image by Orin Optiglot; no, they’re not Neanderthal skulls]

Of course, like a great deal of anthropological speculation, it’s educated guesswork:

The results don’t necessarily show that the ancient humans could speak, Quam says. “We’re saying that the ear changed for some reason and that those changes facilitated the possibility of language development…”

Researchers have long tried to determine whether Neandertals could speak by reconstructing their vocal tracts, Quam says. But soft tissue makes up most of the voice box, so few traces remain in the fossil record. The ear is a better candidate because the bony structure reveals more about hearing capacity.

Couple this with the recent discovery that Neanderthals also had a gene which governs the development of language and is only found in modern humans, and we start to get a picture of our distant ancestors that differs considerably from the grunting caveman stereotype.

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Change your language, change your personality?

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languageinterchangejpg“To have another language is to possess a second soul,” Charlemagne supposedly said, possibly in a Germanic dialect of the Franks. That certainly implies another personality, which is what researchers in the Journal of Consumer Research report observing in a study of bicultural, bilingual women.

…[W]omen classified themselves as more assertive when they spoke Spanish than when they spoke English. They also had significantly different perceptions of women in ads when the ads were in Spanish versus English. “In the Spanish-language sessions, informants perceived females as more self-sufficient and extroverted,” write the authors.

The researchers say the shift, which seems to occur unconsciously, could have implications for political and purchasing choices. Not to mention an interesting side-effect to a shrinking world.

[Image: jetheriot]

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The future of English

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cat price Ooh, this combines two of my favorite things:  languages and the future.  John Scalzi’s grammar bitch of the day (granted, that day was a while ago) touches on one of those small spelling differences, specifically ‘alright’ vs ‘all right’.  While I disagree with Mr. Scalzi on this point (‘alright’ is  usable as that Lichtenstein art he has up, though I’d ask somebody “Are you all right?”), it’s something to think about when discussing the differences between English spellings.  I’ve spent all day today trying to explain to Japanese eight-year-olds why I say “zee” and my co-worker says “zed.”

Garance wonders if the proliferation of an unedited Internet might not bring about a return to the writings of previous centuries, when men wore hose and words were spelled phonetically:

As blogs move us into a less heavily copy-edited world, I sometimes wonder if we’re moving back into a more 16th and 17th century form of writing, where the idea of correct spelling was less important than the communication of meaning — which, in reality, can be accomplished just as well with incorrectly spelled words and homonyms as with a more perfect language. And also: as we move ever deeper into this new world of speech-like writing, will the perfect, formal language of the page one day seem as antique and elaborate as Victorian silverware?

What say you all?  I’m a stickler for spelling and grammar (though I muck it up a fair bit), but I can definitely see a return to a more homonymic age. (funny, lowercase ‘internet’ doesn’t pass my spellchecker, but ‘homonymic’ does just fine)

(image from lolcats, of course)