Colourless green ideas sleep furiously

[Pandorag]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100331141419.htm

Very interesting article! Incidentally, a fellow linguist of mine will spend the summer with a biologist and his student to record bird songs, and she'll show them how to segment and code the recordings. Linguists are very versatile!

A quote from the article:

The new work provides insights to help scientists understand how humans learn language. It also sets the stage for future studies that could help identify the genetic and molecular origins of speech disorders, such as those related to autism, stroke, stuttering and Parkinson's disease, the researchers say.

[Pandorag]

The first Russian student to England.

I came across this at languagehat.com, you can read the article here: http://www.krotov.info/engl/library/szulinsk.html

Tsar Boris sent them to England to learn English, but troubled times prevented their return to their homeland.

[Pandorag]

Great article about thought structure and language.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html

[Pandorag]

<a href=Bilingualism delays onset of Alzheimer's symptoms>Bilingualism delays onset of Alzheimer's symptoms[/url]

There are exceptions: a friend of mine told our class that her grandfather's Alzheimer affected his language area in the brain. As a French native speaker, he would speak very loudly in English and very softly in French, so they had to make him speak in English to understand him. Strange but true.

[deezelboy]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20384-evolutionary-babel-was-in-southern-africa.html

The larger a population is, the more diverse the number of sounds that make up language become.  Quentin Atkinson, University of Auckland, devised a computer program to analyse the diversity of around 500 languages.  Sub-Saharan Africa turned out to have the greatest diversity, South America and Oceania the least (mirroring genetic diversity, which is why we believe our species originated in Sub-Saharan Africa).

...Atkinson compared the phoneme content of languages around the world and used this analysis to determine the most likely origin of all language. He found that sub-Saharan Africa was a far better fit for the origin of modern language than any other location.

"One of the big questions is whether there was a single origin of language", or if it emerged in parallel in different locations, says Atkinson. "This suggests there was one major origin in Africa."

 

[Pandorag]

What intrigues me is that with only 500+ language studied over 3000+ in the world, doesn't that just mean that Africa has the same language origin? It doesn't necessarily mean it's the oldest... There is a lot of ideas and theories going around in Historical Linguistics and Comparative linguistics

Anyway, I'm asking questions (cause I like to do that), we have the whole study available at Uni.