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+49 +8
Amazing Discovery Claims Elephants Have Specific 'Names' For Each Other
As elephants wander the African savannah, they might keep in touch with relatives by calling out their individual 'names'.
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+29 +4
More States Require Schools to Teach Cursive Writing. Why?
Technological advances notwithstanding, advocates give a long list of reasons for teaching students cursive.
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+24 +3
7 Unusual Writing Systems From Around the World & How They Developed
Over the millennia, human language has produced a variety of beautiful, unusual, and weird forms of writing. Here are 7 of them.
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+17 +1
Voynich Manuscript Has Real Message After All, Say Scientists
Dr Marcelo Montemurro from the University of Manchester and Dr Damian Zanette from the Centro Atómico Bariloche e Instituto Balseiro, Argentina, claim to have found linguistic patterns in the world’s most mysterious book, the Voynich manuscript.
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+10 +3
Neanderthals shared speech and language with modern humans, study suggests
Fast-accumulating data seem to indicate that our close cousins, the Neanderthals, were much more similar to us than imagined even a decade ago. But did they have anything like modern speech and language? And if so, what are the implications for understanding present-day linguistic diversity?
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+9 +1
American man wakes up with amnesia speaking Swedish
Doctors are looking into the mystery of an American man who awoke speaking only Swedish, with no memory of his past, after he was found unconscious four months ago at a motel in southern California. Michael Boatwright, 61, woke up with amnesia, calling himself Johan Ek, the Desert Sun reported.
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+19 +4
Microsoft Is Teaching Kinect to Understand Sign Language
Microsoft Research Asia says they have tested ways the Microsoft Kinect device could translate sign language and help individuals who are deaf communicate.
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+13 +3
Oxford English Dictionary will change the entry for 'marriage' to include gay people
Language experts at the Oxford English Dictionary said the definition did not change overnight but they will monitor how the word marriage changes over the next year.
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+9 +2
India lost 220 languages in last 50 years, survey finds
India has lost around 20% of its languages in the past five decades, a survey by the Vadodara-based Bhasha Research and Publication Centre has revealed.
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+10 +5
Will Apple Ever Fix the iMessage Text-Killing Problem?
Apple makes free texting convenient by bundling its own iMessage system with SMS. But there's a dark side.
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+9 +2
When Tech Turns Nouns Into Smarter Nouns
How might an influx of smart gadgets change the English language?
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+4 +1
How Google Has Turned Language Translation into a Math Problem
Language translation is a notoriously difficult task for humans, let alone computers. But in trying to solve that problem Google has stumbled across a clever trick, that involves treating them like maps-and it really, really works.
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+10 +1
The Birth of Cool
Coul, coole, koole: How we got from cool temperatures to cool cats.
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+14 +3
How many spaces should there be at the end of a sentence?
The question of whether you should put one or two spaces after the period at the end of a sentence elicits strong reactions on both sides. On the one-space side, this 2011 Slate article by Farhad Manjoo (which has over 165,000 Facebook likes) lays out the argument for why "typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong."
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+17 +1
Stop Calling All Criticism “Shaming”
Just because you don’t like someone’s criticism doesn’t mean they’re “shaming” you.
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+9 +5
Hey, Y’all: Southern Accents Voted Most Attractive
Everyone knows that having a British accent makes men approximately 300 times more attractive, but which American accent makes both genders swoon? According to a survey by dating site Cupid.com, the sing-song honey sweetness of the Southern accent is the country’s sexiest, and by a pretty significant margin.
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+11 +1
Why 'the' is so difficult to define
It's the most frequent word in the English language, accounting for around four percent of all the words we write or speak. It's everywhere, all the time, so clearly it must be doing something important. Words have meaning. That's fundamental, isn't it? So what does "the," a word that seems to be supporting a significant portion of the entire weight of our language, mean? It must mean something, right?
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+6 +1
Huh Means the Same Thing in Every Language
How the dynamics of human conversation gave shape to a word that knows no boundaries.
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+27 +7
English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet
Linguists are recognizing the delightful evolution of the word "because."
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+10 +4
When did our plainest punctuation mark become so aggressive?
The period was always the humblest of punctuation marks. Recently, however, it’s started getting angry. I’ve noticed it in my text messages and online chats, where people use the period not simply to conclude a sentence, but to announce “I am not happy about the sentence I just concluded.”
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