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The world's 6,000 or so modern languages may have all descended from a single ancestral tongue spoken by early African humans between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, a new study suggests. The finding, published Thursday in the journal Science, could help explain how the first spoken language emerged, spread and contributed to the evolutionary success of the human species. Quentin Atkinson, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and author of the study, found that the first migrating populations leaving Africa laid the groundwork for all the world's cultures by taking their single language with them—the...

Language has an effect. Violent political encounters have an effect. The link of the use of guns with patriotism and morality has an effect. Expressions like "targeting" and "in the crosshairs" evokes images of shooting to kill. The murder of a liberal leader in Pakistan seemed far away. Now it's here days later. Given all the death threats, it was almost inevitable. Gabby Giffords was in the crosshairs. Republicans will say it was just the work of some crazy. Hardly. Even crazies get their ideas from somewhere. Violent political encounters and the language of violence activate the idea of violence....

The typical English accent didn't develop until after the Revolutionary War, so Americans actually speak proper English. Here comes the science. Did Americans in 1776 have British accents? Reading David McCulloughÂ’s 1776, I found myself wondering: Did Americans in 1776 have British accents? If so, when did American accents diverge from British accents? The answer surprised me. IÂ’d always assumed that Americans used to have British accents, and that American accents diverged after the Revolutionary War, while British accents remained more or less the same. Americans in 1776 did have British accents in that American accents and British accents hadnÂ’t...

Research illuminating an ancient language connection between Asia and North America supports archeological and genetic evidence that a Bering Strait land bridge once connected North America with Asia, and the discovery is being endorsed by a growing list of scholars in the field of linguistics and other sciences. The work of Western Washington University linguistics professor Edward Vajda with the isolated Ket people of Central Siberia is revealing more and more examples of an ancient language connection with the language family of Na-Dene, which includes Tlingit, Gwich’in, Dena’ina, Koyukon, Navajo, Carrier, Hupa, Apache and about 45 other languages. In 2008,...

An order of the Virginia Colonial Council dated May 4, 1725, concerned an allegation that "divers Indians plundered the Quarters of Mr. John Taliaferro near the great mountains [i.e., the Blue Ridge] . . .[and carried off] some of the Guns belonging to and marked with the name of Spottsylvania County . . . ." The Council concluded: "It is ordered that it be referred to Colo. Harrison to make inquiry which of the Nottoway Indians or other Tributaries have been out ahunting about that time . . . ." Now, the Colonial Council was an august body and its...

I want to remove a useless letter of the alphabet. Why is there a "Q"? Why does it have an unearned spot in the alphabet? The most useful letters of the alphabet are all front loaded. ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP the slackers of the crowd are all stuck in the back as an afterthought, i.e. WXYZ. Where does the self rightous, 10 point Scrabble letter "Q" get off slipping into line before RSTUV? Did they know the bouncer? Notice Q's accomplice U garnered a cheap 1 point role in Scrabble to facilitate Q's infiltration into the language. If I have my way we...

With only 3.000 speakers in Northwest Siberia the Ob-Ugrian language Mansi is on the verge of extinction. Predictions say it will be extinct in ten to twenty years at the latest. The same holds true for Khanti, a member of the same language family. It is for this reason that extensive documentation is so important. Johanna Laakso, professor for Finno-Ugrian Studies at the University of Vienna concerns herself with the documentation of this and other minority languages in the framework of an FWF project and the EU project ELDIA... The documentation of the languages Mansi and Khanti is additionally of...

The 400-year-old mystery of whether William Shakespeare was the author of an unattributed play about Edward III may have been solved by a computer program designed to detect plagiarism. Sir Brian Vickers, an authority on Shakespeare at the Institute of English Studies at the University of London, believes that a comparison of phrases used in The Reign of King Edward III with Shakespeare’s early works proves conclusively that the Bard wrote the play in collaboration with Thomas Kyd, one of the most popular playwrights of his day. The professor used software called Pl@giarism, developed by the University of Maastricht to...

When archaeologists on a dig in southern Portugal last year flipped over a heavy chunk of slate and saw writing not used for more than 2,500 years, they were elated. The enigmatic pattern of inscribed symbols curled symmetrically around the upper part of the rough-edged, yellowish stone tablet and coiled into the middle in a decorative style typical of an extinct Iberian language called Southwest Script. "We didn't break into applause, but almost," says Amilcar Guerra, a University of Lisbon lecturer overseeing the excavation. "It's an extraordinary thing."

Intuitive Grammar Develops By Age Six, Say Researchers ScienceDaily (Apr. 29, 2008) — Psychologists at the University of Liverpool have discovered that children as young as six are as adept at recognising possible verbs and their past tenses as adults. In a study conducted by the University's Child Language Study Centre, children aged between six and nine were given sentences containing made-up verbs such as 'the duck likes to spling' and were asked to judge the acceptability of possible past tense forms. The study focused on the process the children used to come to their conclusions rather than whether their...

Last week, Chief Marie Smith Jones, the only remaining native speaker of the Eyak language, died in her home in Anchorage, Alaska. Chief Jones' death makes Eyak—part of the Athabascan family of languages—the first known native Alaskan tongue to go extinct. Linguists fear that 19 more will soon follow the same fate. Fortunately, starting in 1961, Chief Jones and five other native-speaking Eyaks worked with Michael Krauss, a linguist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, to document Eyak in case future generations want to revive it. How would you go about learning a language that nobody speaks? It depends....

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Marie Smith Jones, who worked to preserve her heritage as the last full-blooded member of Alaska's Eyak Indians and the last fluent speaker of their native language, has died. She was 89. Jones died in her sleep Monday at her home in Anchorage. She was found by a friend, said daughter Bernice Galloway, who lives in Albuquerque, N.M. "To the best of our knowledge she was the last full-blooded Eyak alive," Galloway said Tuesday. "She was a woman who faced incredible adversity in her life and overcame it," Galloway said. "She was about as tenacious as...

"If I was President, this wouldn't have happened," John Kerry said during Hezbollah's war on Israel last summer. As 2004's Democratic presidential nominee should know, he should have said, "If I were President…" It's sad, but hardly surprising, that the subjunctive evades someone of Kerry's stature. The English language is under fire, as if it strolled into an ambush. It would be bad enough if this assault involved the slovenly grammar, syntax, and spelling of drooling boors. But America's elites -- politicians, journalists, and marketers who should know better -- constantly batter our tongue. The subjunctive, for instance, lies gravely...

AUSTIN --Although stories of der Cowboy and die Stinkkatze mayno longer get told in Texas, Germanic linguistics professor Hans Boas wants to make sure nobody forgets them.Boas, an assistant professor at the University of Texas, is the founder and manager of the Texas German Preservation Project. Every month or so Boas ventures forth from his campus office in Austin to small towns like Boerne, Fredericksburg and Crawford to conduct interviews with the dwindling number of old-timers who speak the odd mixture of English and 19th-century German.It's a dialect unique to the Lone Star State, and most of the 8,000 or...

Lithuanian and Latvian languages are not Slavic and not Balto-Slavic. I made a deep esearch and I can say that both Baltic languages are definitely not Slavic, not even close, and neither Balto-Slavic. They should be separated into a very early separation branch similar to Armenian. There are very few Slavic-sounding words in both Baltic languages and those words were borrowed in near modern times. All other words (99,999999%) in both Baltic languages don't even remind of any Slavic language. There are words that sound Arabic, Franco, Latin, Greek, even English and Italiamn and even Pacific, but very few Slavic...

There are hundreds of dialects among China's 1.3bn people Only about half of China's population can speak the national language, Mandarin, according to the state news agency Xinhua.More men speak Mandarin than women, and more urbanites speak the language than those in rural areas, Xinhua said. For many years now, the government has tried to increase the use of Mandarin, to promote social cohesion. But China has hundreds of dialects, some of which - such as Cantonese and Hokkien - have strong regional support. In a survey of 500,000 people around the country, the Ministry of Education found that...

Quebec swears by its English curses But church-related expletives spoken in French not accepted on TV Toronto red Star December 12, 2006 SEAN GORDON QUEBEC BUREAU CHIEF MONTREAL - In English Canada it is among the baddest of the bad words, a wash-your-mouth-out-with-soap, four-letter epithet considered unsuitable for polite company, never mind broadcast. And yet, it is heard almost daily on Quebec's f-bomb friendly airwaves, where French-speaking hosts — and their guests — cheerfully throw the word around as a colourful alternative to "heck." The 1.6 million viewers of Tout le monde en parle, Radio-Canada's top-rated Sunday evening television...

They litter almost every studio and agent's office in Hollywood -- issues of the instantly recognized Hollywood trade paper Variety, its bright green banner and bold headlines heralding opening box office receipts, movie deals, acquisitions, everything on the big and small screen to behind the scenes. In the competitive world of show business, Variety is almost required reading. For the newcomer, the reading requires a certain knowledge of show biz shorthand. Scanning the headlines at this Los Angeles newsstand, this one caught my eye: MOUSE HEADS TO COURT FOR CEO SEARCH. Now if you didn't know right away this was...

A recent e-mail from a dedicated teacher illustrates a problem that has received far too little attention. In her kindergarten class was a little black girl who did well except for getting a very obvious question wrong. It turned out that the little girl had no problem with the concepts or the facts but had misinterpreted a word because it sounded like another word that she had heard used at home, where a "black English" dialect was spoken. Since the teacher was white, she knew that she was running a risk by getting into this issue. Opening this can of...

NEW YORK The cover story by Matt Bai in the upcoming Sunday issue of The New York Times Magazine profiles the man some liberals allegedly consider a possible new “messiah” for the Democratic party, George Lakoff. An adviser to the party on “framing” issues, he wrote “Don't Think of an Elephant”-- a book about politics and language based on his own linguistic theories. “Framing” is the process of choosing the best words to describe individual issues and characterize a debate. Bai hails Lakoff as the father of the concept. His ideas seemed to gain some success recently in putting the...