An ancient language which could shed light on some of history’s first ‘barbarians’ has been discovered on clay tablets in Turkey.
Archaeologists excavating the site of an Assyrian imperial governors’ palace in the city of Tusha uncovered the tablets, which reveal the names of 60 women. When studied in detail, archaeologists realised the names didn’t bear any resemblance to the thousands of Middle Eastern names already known to researchers.
Because ancient Middle Eastern names are normally composites, made-up, in full or abbreviated form, of ordinary words in the relevant local lexicon, the unique nature of the tablet’s 45 mystery names is seen by scholars as evidence of a previously unknown language.
The clay tablet text originally formed part of the palace’s archive – used by local Assyrian imperial officials to record their administrative, political and economic decisions and actions.
The 60 women (including the 45 with evidence of the previously unattested language) were almost certainly being deployed by the palace authorities for some economic purpose (potentially a female-associated craft activity like weaving). Indeed the text mentions that some of them were being allocated to specific local villages. (Source: Independent)
Linguistics experts will now work alongside archaeologists to try and identify the mystery language, and see if it has links to other known languages from the era.
Which state are you from? Do you love your accent?
CNN recently asked people around the country to read out a standard text so that their accent could be evaluated. The common myth is that regional accents are becoming homogenised in our global media age, but linguists and the report seem to disprove this. CNN’s report also asked people to comment on their perceptions of their own accent and how they think others view it.
Some of the strongest opinions came from iReporters with “country” accents: Southern or Western. These accents are among the most stigmatized in the United States, and people who possess them have a wide range of views, from pride to annoyance.
“I hope that when others hear me speak, they hear me, not my western twang,” writes iReporter Sarah Beth Boynton, who was raised in Salt Lake City
Boynton grew up singing with her family and got sick of hearing that she should only sing country music because of her accent.
“I have made a concerted effort to speak with as little ‘western twang’ in my accent as possible,” she revealed. (Source: CNN.com)
Sadly it seems that discrimination against some regional accents still exists and also extends to international accents. A 2010 study from the Unviersity of Chicago found that people speaking with a ‘standard’ American accent were seen as more credible than those speaking with a ‘foreign’ accent.
Indiana has become the latest state to drop the requirement for children to learn joined-up (cursive) handwriting.
The new Common Core State Standards Initiative does not require cursive, and around forty states have so far signed up to it. Some states, including Massachusetts and California, have re-included cursive as is allowed by the Standards.
Indiana will instead focus on children learning typing skills, which education officials say are more useful for the employment world.
Many schools have said there simply is not enough time in the term to teach children both.
Dr Scott Hamilton, an Indiana clinical psychologist, said the time children spend labouring over script could be better used.
“From an intuitive standpoint, this makes sense, based on the increasingly digital world into which this generation of children is growing up,” he said.
Denna Renbarger, an education official in Lawrence Township, Indiana, said there were many more important things for students to be learning at school
“I think it’s progressive of our state to be ahead on this,” she told the Indianapolis Star. (Source: BBC News)
The decision is contentious, with some parents, psychologists and educators arguing that there is more to handwriting than being able to write quickly.
“The fluidity of cursive allows for gains in spelling and a better tie to what they are reading and comprehending through stories and through literature,” Paul Sullivan, head teacher of a school in California, told CNN.
“I think there’s a firmer connection of wiring between the brain’s processes of learning these skills and the actual practice of writing.”
What do you think? Should children still be learning cursive?
Clever people are often said to have a ‘big’ brain – but one brain is surely no bigger than another.
A study from the University of Hong Kong has shown that you can add grey matter however – through ‘child-like’ learning. The research participants were shown different coloured cards, each of which was given a made-up name. They were asked to memorise these new names, and told they would be tested at a later date.
The participants were given MRI scans after three days of this ‘conditioning’ (five sessions totalling around two hours each) and the scans showed that new grey matter had formed in the left hemisphere of the brains. Language functions are normally found in the left hemisphere of the brain.
According to the article from Wired:
The key to the brain growth appears to be the change in perception, because the colours were given new names and the subjects learnt to associate those new names with the colours — as opposed to them simply learning a list of names, for example. This is supported by the fact that the areas of the brain responsible for processing colour, vision and perceptions were the ones that grew.
I wonder if this also applies to learning new languages?
Now here’s a cheery bit of news for St. Patrick’s Day – a professor at the University of Notre Dame has said that the Irish language is gaining in popularity among students.
Brian O’Conchubhair, associate professor of Irish at Notre Dame’s Irish Language and Literature Department, says that some people saw the language as more glamorous when the Irish economy was doing well in the 1990s. Previously the language had been associated with poor and uneducated people , and many immigrants left it behind in order to learn English.
Students are learning the language for a variety of reasons, from interest in their cultural heritage to those looking for something “fun and different”. (Source: The Republic)
The Onion reports that ‘incomprehensible shouting’ has been named an official US language. Opponents of the move favour Obama’s ‘dulcet tones’ initiative.
Incomprehensible Shouting Named Official U.S. Language
Hilarious.
It’s a sad day for one of my favourite language columns, “On Language” in the New York Times. After a 32 year run, this is the final week for the column.
“On Language” explored language issues and explained them in an easily accessible way. Ben Zimmer’s final column looks at the future of languages, particularly exploring the impact of technology on the way we communicate and the language we use:
Every aspect of our linguistic life is open to technologization of one form or another, from the way that kids of Blake’s generation will learn to acquire literacy with the help of app-laden multitouch devices to our growing expectations that computer interfaces should be able to recognize our speech and text, understand it and talk back to us.
Do you agree with Zimmer? Is “technologization” going to affect our linguistic lives to such a large extent?
It seems that no Superbowl can pass without controversy. This year the spotlight is on Christina Aguilera, who botched the lyrics to the national anthem.
She should know better really – Rosanne Barr is still criticised for her 1990 performance of the Star Spangled Banner after all. I’m from a country where the anthem is kept short and simple (God save our gracious Queen/long live our noble Queen/God save the Queen), so I can sympathise with Aguilera – I’d certainly find it tough to remember all these words under pressure.
My sympathy deepened when I looked up the lyrics to the Star Spangled Banner:
Oh, say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thru the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
Yep, that’s a lot more complicated than “God save the Queen”! Aguilera has been widely criticised for singing “What so proudly we watched at the twilight’s last reaming” instead of the real line “O’er the ramparts we watch’d, were so gallantly streaming” and has issued a statement saying she hoped “the true spirit of the anthem still came through”.
What do you think of Aguilera’s blunder? Can you always remember all the correct lyrics, and in the right order?
New research has shown that bilingual people find it easier to learn a third language, according to Science Daily.
The study was conducted at the University of Haifa, and aimed to find out what, if any, benefits there were in being bilingual when learning another language. The researchers found it was easier for bilingual people to learn a third language as they generally had a better aptitude for languages.
Two groups were involved in the study; the participants in one group spoke Hebrew only (with some English learned in school) and in the other group the mother tongue was Russian, but participants were also fluent in Hebrew. From the article:
This team of scholars also noted that the fact that the Russian speakers had better Hebrew skills than the Hebrew speakers themselves indicates that acquiring a mother tongue and preserving that language in a bilingual environment does not come at the expense of learning a second language — Hebrew in this case. In fact, the opposite is true: fluency and skills in one language assist in the language acquisition of a second language, and possessing skills in two languages can boost the learning process of a third language.
“Gaining command of a number of languages improves proficiency in native languages,” Prof. Abu-Rabia explained. “This is because languages reinforce one another, and provide tools to strengthen phonologic, morphologic and syntactic skills. These skills provide the necessary basis for learning to read. Our study has also shown that applying language skills from one language to another is a critical cognitive function that makes it easier for an individual to go through the learning process successfully. Hence, it is clear that tri-lingual education would be most successful when started at a young age and when it is provided with highly structured and substantive practice,” he concluded. (Source: Science Daily)
So, what are you waiting for? Start learning your second, third, fourth or more language now!
A new study has found that people who speak in similar styles are more compatible.
Conducted by researchers from the University of Texas at Austin, the study examined “function words” to see if their use had any correlation with the long-term prospects of a relationship. Function words are words that show how nouns and verbs relate – a, the, will, and, etc. According to James Pennebaker, who co-authored the study, these words constitute our writing and speaking styles, and they are also “highly social”.
From Science Daily:
They conducted two experiments in which a computer program compared partners’ language styles.
In the first study, pairs of college students had four-minute speed dates while their conversations were recorded. Almost every pair covered the same topics: What’s your major? Where are you from? How do you like college? Every conversation sounded more or less the same to the naked ear, but text analysis revealed stark differences in language synchrony. The pairs whose language style matching scores were above average were almost four times as likely to want future contact as pairs whose speaking styles were out of sync.
A second study revealed the same pattern in everyday online chats between dating couples over the course of 10 days. Almost 80 percent of the couples whose writing style matched were still dating three months later, compared with approximately 54 percent of the couples who didn’t match as well.
What people are saying to each other is important, but how they are saying it may be even more telling. People aren’t consciously synchronizing their speech, Pennebaker says. “What’s wonderful about this is we don’t really make that decision; it just comes out of our mouths.”
If this post has made you a little worried about where your relationship is going (sorry!), then visit the study’s ‘Language Style Matching’ application to test the theory! Just don’t take it too seriously…
