Computers are terrible at learning language. Would they be any better if they learned it like humans have to?
A team of computer scientists has built a ‘robot baby’ that is interacting with people and learning to speak. Ground-breaking, or …
Author: Daniel Midgley (page 34 of 41)
It’s official: bogan has made it into the Oxford dictionary.
It’s language’s highest bar to clear, and its inclusion means that by any definition, bogan is truly a word. How do words get into the dictionary, anyway? And what do …
Apes don’t have language, but they do gesture.
They’ve even been observed using a special form of gesture with their young. Could it be primate baby-talk? What can we learn from our nearest relatives about how our language started?
Linguist …
Are there secrets in your search history?
We sometimes submit search queries that we wouldn’t admit to friends. And by looking at our searches, researchers can unearth things we’d rather keep hidden, including covert racism and sexual predilections.
Linguist Daniel …
Even with the huge vocabulary of English, we still haven’t got all the words covered.
Other languages have words that we don’t have single-word equivalents for. Can they be mapped onto English? And why do we have gaps in our …
TW: sexual assault
Should we use the word rape when it’s not about actual rape?
What about retarded or gay?
The meanings of words can change, but sometimes this means conflict as we decide what’s okay and what’s not …
Archaeologists have found the oldest known art from our early ancestors.
These carvings are thousands of years older than the earliest cave paintings — also in southern France. Who carved them, and why? And what’s the link between art and …
Is it the Persian Gulf, or the Arabian Gulf? It depends on who you ask.
But Google’s map makers are finding that it’s hard to stay impartial to political conflict when putting a name on a map can cause international …
Can baboons read?
Not exactly, but in a recent experiment, they could tell the difference between real words and fake words. What does this tell us about animals, and what could it do for us?
Linguist Daniel Midgley spells it …
Passive Voice Day was held last week.
The linguistic phenomenon known as passive voice is hated by editors, checked by computers, and used by all of us. But it’s not well understood, and often misidentified in the press. How can …
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