World's Languages Can Be Traced Back To A Single African Mother Tongue

The World: World's languages traced back to single African mother tongue: scientists 

Scientists say they have traced the world's 6,000 modern languages — from English to Mandarin — back to a single "mother tongue," an ancestral language spoken in Africa 50,000 to 70,000 years ago. 

New research, published in the journal Science, suggests this single ancient language resulted in human civilization — a Diaspora — as well as advances in art and hunting tool technology, and laid the groundwork for all the world's cultures. 

The research, by Quentin Atkinson from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, also found that speech evolved far earlier than previously thought. And the findings implied, though did not prove, that modern language originated only once, an issue of controversy among linguists, according to the New York Times.  

Read more ....  

CSN Editor: The stat that caught my attention in this post is that there are 6,000 modern languages.

How Do Some People Have The Ability To Quickly Learn And Speak Multiple Languages?

Judith Thurman, New Yorker: People Who Speak Dozens of Languages

What can hyperpolyglots teach the rest of us?

Last May, Luis Miguel Rojas-Berscia, a doctoral candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, in the Dutch city of Nijmegen, flew to Malta for a week to learn Maltese. He had a hefty grammar book in his backpack, but he didn’t plan to open it unless he had to. “We’ll do this as I would in the Amazon,” he told me, referring to his fieldwork as a linguist. Our plan was for me to observe how he went about learning a new language, starting with “hello” and “thank you.”

Read more ....

CSN editor: I envy these people. I speak and read Russian, English, Ukrainian, and French .... and I am the first to admit that it has not been easy learning these languages. But 10 languages and more?!?!?!

Wow.

A Universal Translator Becomes Reality

William Shatner as James T Kirk: The new device is similar to the Universal Translator used in Star Trek, and takes around one hour to get used to a person's voice then works by comparing the words that have been recorded with stock models for the target language

Star Trek Becomes Reality As Microsoft 'Universal Translator' Turns Spoken English Into Any Of 26 Different Languages -- Daily Mail

* Software speaks in user's own voice
* Can translate into languages from Spanish to Mandarin
* Speaks smoothly in sentences, not individual words
* Could be built into smartphone language apps

It has long been used by James T Kirk to speak to aliens and blue women from space - but now Microsoft is on the brink of making a real, working Universal Translator.

Frank Soong and Rick Rashid have created software which converts English language speech into any of 26 foreign languages - and which 'speaks' in the user's own voice.

All the user has to do is speak English into the machine and it will convert it into anything from Spanish to Mandarin.

Read more ....

My Comment: I am traveling this summer .... so faster please.

Ancient Language Dictionary Finished

Martha Roth, Editor in Charge of the Assyrian Dictionary at the University of Chicago, puts the final volume in the set of books. (Credit: University of Chicago)

Huge Ancient Language Dictionary Finished After 90 Years -- Science Daily

ScienceDaily (June 9, 2011) — An ambitious project to identify, explain and provide citations for the words written in cuneiform on clay tablets and carved in stone by Babylonians, Assyrians and others in Mesopotamia between 2500 B.C. and A.D. 100 has been completed after 90 years of labor, the University of Chicago announced June 5.

Read more ....

My Comment: I look forward to them putting it online.

Google Launches Latin Translation Tool

Google has added Latin to its list of languages on Google Translate

From The Telegraph:

Google Translate, a service that can instantly translate entire web pages or chunks of text in to another language, has added Latin to its list.

Google Translate supports more than 50 languages, including minority languages such as Welsh and Haitian Creole, and the addition of Latin is sure to please scholars and traditionalists.

In a blog post, written entirely in Latin, Jakob Uszkoreit, a senior engineer at Google, said that Latin was far from a “dead language”.

Read more ....

The Beckoning Silence: Why Half Of The World's Languages Are in Serious Danger Of Dying Out

Language hotspots are areas with extreme linguistic diversity, containing many highly endangered and underdocumented languages

From The Independent:

Of the 6,500 languages spoken in the world, half are expected to die out by the end of this century. Now, one man is trying to keep those voices alive by reigniting local pride in heritage and identity.

High up, perched among the remote hilltops of eastern Nepal, sits a shaman, resting on his haunches in long grass. He is dressed simply, in a dark waistcoat and traditional kurta tunic with a Nepalese cap sitting snugly on his head. To his left and right, two men hold recording devices several feet from his face, listening patiently to his precious words. His tongue elicits sounds alien to all but a few people in the world, unfamiliar even to those who inhabit his country. His eyes flicker with all the intensity of a man reciting for the first time to a western audience his tribe's version of the Book of Genesis, its myth of origins.

Read more ....

Technology Brings New Insights To One Of The Oldest Middle Eastern Languages Still Spoken

Tablets uncovered at Persepolis in Iran are covered with writing in Aramaic. The archive, being studied at the University of Chicago, provides new insights on the language, which has been written and spoken in the Middle East continuously since ancient times. (Credit: Oriental Institute, University of Chicago)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 16, 2009) — New technologies and academic collaborations are helping scholars at the University of Chicago analyze hundreds of ancient documents in Aramaic, one of the Middle East’s oldest continuously spoken and written languages.

Read more ....

Universal Translator For Web Browsers

From New Scientist:

EVER wondered what the Arabic or Chinese press are saying about the issues of the day? Finding out just got a lot easier, at least for those using the Firefox web browser.

A new plug-in identifies the language used on a web page and automatically provides a translation, leaving the layout of the page unchanged.

Read more ....

Dying Languages Archived For Future Generations

Cambridge University

From The Telegraph:

A Cambridge University project to safeguard the world's 6,000 spoken languages has been launched after it emerged half could die out within a generation.

The World Oral Literature Project aims to help cultures under threat from globalisation create lasting records of their native languages.

Still in its inaugural year, the project led by Cambridge University's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, has already handed out around 10 grants to tribes from Mongolia to Nigeria - and the researchers admitted traditional British languages such as Cornish and Gaelic are also at risk.

Read more ....

Decoding Antiquity: Eight Scripts That Still Can't Be Read

Photo: The Etruscan Alphabet - Shown here are two of three gold plaques from Pyrgi, circa 500BC. The plaque on the left is written in Etruscan, while the one on the right is written in Phoenician. They both describe the same event - the dedication by the Etruscan ruler Thefarie Velianas of a cult place (Image: Museo di Villa Giulia, Rome)

From The New Scientist:

WRITING is one of the greatest inventions in human history. Perhaps the greatest, since it made history possible. Without writing, there could be no accumulation of knowledge, no historical record, no science - and of course no books, newspapers or internet.

The first true writing we know of is Sumerian cuneiform - consisting mainly of wedge-shaped impressions on clay tablets - which was used more than 5000 years ago in Mesopotamia. Soon afterwards writing appeared in Egypt, and much later in Europe, China and Central America. Civilisations have invented hundreds of different writing systems. Some, such as the one you are reading now, have remained in use, but most have fallen into disuse.

These dead scripts tantalise us. We can see that they are writing, but what do they say?

Read more ....

As The World's Languages Disappear, Basque Revives

From McClatchy:

ST. JEAN DE LUZ, France — The world is losing languages at an alarming rate, a United Nations agency reported Thursday, with thousands of tongues expected to disappear by the end of this century.

Yet amid the losses, one community — the Basque people, who live in the mountainous region of southern France and northern Spain — is reviving a language that many once feared would die out.

In St. Jean de Luz, a seaside town near the Spanish border at the western edge of the Pyrenees, efforts are under way to revitalize the Basque language, which 30 years ago was rarely heard outside mountain villages. Among a population of about 3 million in the Basque region, which comprises seven provinces in Spain and France, an estimated 700,000 people speak Basque today.

Bilingual signs dot the roads and mark storefronts, and an annual festival celebrates the Basque language, music and culture. Public and private schools full of children and adults learn Basque.

Read more ....

New Atlas Shows Dying Languages Around The World

Click On The Image To Enlarge (Image from Thinking Shift)

From Yahoo News/AP:

PARIS – Only one native speaker of Livonian remains on Earth, in Latvia. The Alaskan language Eyak went extinct last year when its last surviving speaker passed away.

Those are just two of the nearly 2,500 languages that UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, says are in danger of becoming extinct or have recently disappeared. That's out of a total of 6,000 world languages.

In a presentation Thursday of a new world atlas of endangered languages, linguists stressed the list is not restricted to small or far-flung countries. They also sought to encourage immigrants to treasure their native languages.

Read more ....

Why Some People Have A Better Head For Languages

(Image from Baltic Media)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 26, 2008) — Learning a second language is usually difficult and often when we speak it we cannot disguise our origin or accent. However, there are important differences between individuals with regard to the degree to which a second language is mastered, even for people who have lived in a bilingual environment since childhood.

Members of the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group (GRNC) linked to the Barcelona Science Park, have studied these differences. By comparing people who are able to perceive a second language as if they were native speakers of that language with people who find it very difficult to do so, they have observed that the former group is also better at distinguishing the sounds of their own native language. However, there is no difference between the two groups when they hear sounds that do not form part of the language.

Read more ....