#language

Orangutans Use Slang to Show That They're CoolMuch like how we humans have an ever-changing slang that we use within our respective social groups, orangutans also seem to have something similar. Researchers have discovered that these primates create new "kiss-squeak" calls that vary in pitch and duration, and these calls spread quickly through their communities. How long these variations remain in the vocabulary, meanwhile, depends on the density of the orangutan community. A low-density community may have a fewer frequency of new calls, but they tend to stick for a long time. It's the opposite in a dense one, however. The research findings could shed light on where language originates and how it evolves.One of the authors, Dr. Adriano Lameira, explains that since communication is "a cacophony" in high-density communities, individuals want to show off how cool they are with novel calls. But while variations are more frequent in this type of community, they do not stick around for long.While the research focuses on these "kiss-squeak calls," the researchers believe social influence in orangutan communities may not be limited to alarm calls.(Image Credit: Eleifert/ Wikimedia Commons)#Communication #Language #Primates #Orangutan #AnimalCommunication

Evolution of the Alphabet: From Ancient Phoenician and Greek to LatinOur alphabet went through a long time of revisions and adaptations before we were able to familiarize ourselves with the well-known set of letters in the English alphabet.The Proto-Sinaitic was the first-ever alphabet to be used. The script was derived in Canaan, the biblical land of Israel. It was used to describe sound instead of meanings. In addition, as the first Semitic script, the Proto-Sinaitic served as a basis and influenced other languages. It was the precursor to the Phoenician alphabet and became the basis for other languages such as for Arabic, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and Greek. As to how we got the English alphabet, we can trace its origins to the archaic Greek script, which was influenced by the Proto-Sinaitic script. Many of the letters from the ancient script remained in Modern Greek, including some very familiar letters such as Alpha, Beta, Delta, and even Omicron. The influence of the Greeks, including their culture and their very alphabet, made their way into Latin, which evolved into Roman script. Some of the letters in the Roman script are now used in modern English which was established 500 years after the Roman script’s appearance. Image credit: Matt Baker, Visual Capitalist #letters #alphabet #linguistics #history #language

Dogs Recognize Whether a Human Language is Their Owner's LanguageLaura V. Cuaya moved from Mexico to Hungary to do postdoctoral research in neuroethologyat Eötvös Loránd University. She took her dog, Kun-kun, with her. She found people would greet Kun-kun on walks and speak to him in Hungarian. Cuaya wondered what Kun-kun thought of that, and whether he could even distinguish that it was an unfamiliar language. The question was right up her research alley, so she designed an experiment around it.Kun-kun and 17 other dogs were trained to lie still in a brain scanner, in which they were read The Little Prince in both Spanish and Hungarian, followed by a recording of human sounds that aren't speech at all. The results showed a distinct difference in the audio cortex between the recordings of the familiar language and the unfamiliar language. However, there was no significant difference in brain activity between the non-familiar language and the scrambled sounds. The results were published this week in the journal NeuroImage, and the abstract was also used for a video.

The Bouba/Kiki Effect: Regardless of What Language They Speak, People Around the World Agree that "Bouba" Sounds Round in Shape whereas "Kiki" Sounds PointyThe ‘bouba/kiki effect’ states that the made-up word “bouba” makes a sound resembling that of a round shape and the made-up word “kiki” makes a sound resembling that of a pointy shape. This effect is not exclusive to the English language, but it is actually applicable to most languages around the world. This is true even for those with different writing systems, according to language scientists.An international research team observed this effect after conducting a wide cross-cultural test around the world. The ‘bouba/kiki effect’ test included 917 speakers of 25 different languages with nine language families and ten writing systems. The findings of the research team are now published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.“Our ancestors could have used links between speech sounds and visual properties to create some of the first spoken words – and today, many thousands of years later, the perceived roundness of the English word ‘balloon’ may not be just a coincidence, after all,” said co-author Dr. Marcus Perlman, Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Birmingham.“New words that are perceived to resemble the object or concept they refer to are more likely to be understood and adopted by a wider community of speakers. Sound-symbolic mappings such as in bouba/kiki may play an important ongoing role in the development of spoken language vocabularies,” mentioned co-author Dr. Bodo Winter, Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Linguistics at the University of Birmingham.The ‘bouba/kiki effect’ suggests that there are shared characteristics of languages around the world, such as iconic vocalizations that can be used as a global basis for the formation of new words. Moreover, the effect could also be a clue to the origins of spoken words.Image: University of Birmingham#language #shape #words #speak #effect