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Entries in the ' language ' category
Written July 13, 2008 in anthropology, cultural evolution, evolution, genetics, language, linguistics, phylogenetics
In today’s, Evolution: Education and Outreach, Anastasia Thanukos takes A Look at Linguistic Evolution:
Anyone who has ever tackled a Shakespeare play knows that English has changed substantially in the 400 years since Elizabeth I ruled England. In fact, Elizabethan English can seem like a completely different language from the one we speak today. Just try describing [...]
Written July 4, 2008 in anthropology, cultural evolution, europe, evolution, genetics, human prehistory, it-was-better-in-my-day, language, music, stupidity
….and the award for the stupidest science story I’ve seen in months goes to LiveScience.com for “Cave Men Loved to Sing“, in which we’re told that our cave-dwelling ancestors used echo-location:
With only dull light available from a torch, which couldn’t be carried into very narrow passages, the ancient hunters had to use their voices like [...]
Su et al in today’s PLoS One show that Asiatic honeybees can understand the “Waggledance” (video) language of European honeybees:
The honeybee waggle dance, through which foragers advertise the existence and location of a food source to their hive mates, is acknowledged as the only known form of symbolic communication in an invertebrate. However, the suggestion, that different species of honeybee might possess distinct ‘dialects’ of the waggle dance, remains controversial. Furthermore, it remains unclear whether different species of honeybee can learn from and communicate with each other.
This study reports experiments using a mixed-species colony that is composed of the Asiatic bee Apis cerana cerana (Acc), and the European bee Apis mellifera ligustica (Aml). Using video recordings made at an observation hive, we first confirm that Acc and Aml have significantly different dance dialects, even when made to forage in identical environments. When reared in the same colony, these two species are able to communicate with each other: Acc foragers could decode the dances of Aml to successfully locate an indicated food source.
We believe that this is the first report of successful symbolic communication between two honeybee species; our study hints at the possibility of social learning between the two honeybee species, and at the existence of a learning component in the honeybee dance language.
Very very neat indeed. The full paper is available here: East Learns from West: Asiatic Honeybees Can Understand Dance Language of European Honeybees (doi), and ScienceDaily coverage is here.
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Written May 27, 2008 in Uncategorized, anthropology, language, language preservation, linguistics, people
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Written May 22, 2008 in cultural evolution, genetics, language, linguistics, people, phylogenetics
Emma Marris in today’s Nature reviews my field of research, and chats to a number of my friends and colleagues:
In the past five to ten years, more and more non-linguists such as Pagel have used the computational tools with which they model evolution to take a crack at languages. And one can see why. Like [...]
Written May 21, 2008 in books, chimpanzees, language, non-human, ook!, primates, psychology
Back in the 1970s, a chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky took part in a Columbia University research study called “Project Nim.”
Project Nim was led by Herbert Terrace, a psychologist at Columbia who was attempting to find out if a chimpanzee could learn to communicate using American Sign Language.
“Everyone knows that words are learned one at [...]
…We have one verb paradigm for this language already, entrusted to us by an ancient linguist who took some notes once when stuck in the wilds of Papua New Guinea due to visa problems.* The verb is “to swim”. We decide to elicit this from our speaker for comparison purposes.
Our speaker insists her language has [...]
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