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British researchers say they have found 23 words that have persisted for a staggering 15,000 years. These "ultraconserved words" include some that you might expect (you, me, mother, man), others you might not (spit, worm, bark), and at least one somewhat heartwarming entry (give). Over the centuries, the words have retained the same meaning and almost the same sound. The team claims that's because they all come from an ancient "mother tongue" that was used toward the end of the last ice age, the Guardian reports. They assert that the ancient language eventually formed seven language families, which in turn formed the 700 modern languages used by more than half of the planet today. To find the ultraconserved words, linguists looked for cognates-words that have similar meanings and sounds in different languages, like "father" (padre, pere, pater, pitar)-shared by all seven of the aforementioned language families. They then translated the cognates into what they believed the cognates' ancestral words (known as proto-words) would be, then compared those. They ultimately found 23 that were shared by at least four of the language families, including one (thou) that was shared by all seven. Here are all 23 "ultraconserved words", listed by the number of language families in which they have cognates. 7 - thou 6 - I 5 - not, that, we, to give, who 4 - this, what, man/male, ye, old, mother, to hear, hand, fire ,to pull, black, to flow, bark, ashes, to spit, worm

"You, hear me! Give this fire to that old man. Pull the black worm off the bark and give it to the mother. And no spitting in the ashes!" It's an odd little speech. But if you went back 15,000 years and spoke these words to hunter-gatherers in Asia in any one of hundreds of modern languages, there is a chance they would understand at least some of what you were saying. That's because all of the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in the four sentences are words that have descended largely unchanged from a language that died out as the glaciers retreated at the end of the last Ice Age. Those few words mean the same thing, and sound almost the same, as they did then. While traditionally, it's been thought that words can't survive for more than 8,000 to 9,000 years, a team of researchers from the University of Reading has come up with a list of two dozen "ultraconserved words" that have survived 150 centuries. It includes some predictable entries: "mother," "not," "what," "to hear" and "man." It also contains surprises: "to flow," "ashes" and "worm." The existence of the long-lived words suggests there was a "proto-Eurasiatic" language that was the common ancestor to about 700 contemporary languages that are the native tongues of more than half the world's people.

Word "edges" are important for language acquisition. Children start to learn the sound of words by remembering the first and last syllables. A new study sheds light on the information the infant brain uses during language acquisition and the format in which it stores words in its memory. Infants start to learn words very early, during the first months of life, and to do so they have to memorise their sounds and associate them with meanings. The study by Silvia Benavides-Varela (now at the IRCCS Fondazione Ospedale San Camillo in Venice, but at SISSA at the time the study was performed) and Jacques Mehler, neuroscientist at SISSA, revealed the format in which infants remember their first words. In particular, the two scientists saw that infants aged about seven months accurately encode the sound and position of the first and last syllable, whereas they have difficulty retaining the order of syllables in the middle.

Article explores the findings of biologist Mark Pagel: some of the words most commonly used today may have derived from a common protolanguage. The Washington Post has an interactive feature with sound samples of some of the ultraconserved words: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/words-that-last/.

In relation to the current election that just passed, it was pretty obvious that there was a huge disconnect between two opposing sides. Words of frustration and anger flooded newsprints and social media. In the past, researchers found that there was a curious phenomenon in known as "positive feedback", which refers to people's tendency to use more positive words than negative words. In recent years, Google Books and the New York Times partnered to disprove this phenomenon. Both major print companies forged through tons of texts and found that 16.2 million of those texts contained negative language. They also found that negative words were used more frequently during times of unemployment, poverty, inflation rates, wartime casualties and political tension. More research has been conducted by psychological scientist including William Hamilton and Mark Liberman. Shockingly, they found that events like these were being triggered more often and positive language has decreased in the last 200 years.

A U of M professor is trying to beat the clock to finish his masterwork: A dictionary of the origins of some of the most misunderstood words in English.... Liberman discovered that about 1,000 common English words -- mooch, nudge, man, girl, boy, frog, oat, witch and skedaddle among them -- seemed to be highly confused or all but untraceable, as if they magically appeared in English, pouf!

This article talks about how society right now is living in "The Age of Profanity," meaning that swearing has become so much a part of our lives, that it isn't really viewed as "inappropriate" anymore. In the article, Benjamin K. Bergen and Michael Adams, who both wrote two different books about profanity, agree that the court system, English teachers, and parents who teach children that swearing is unacceptable, are the only reasons why profane words still exist today. Benjamin K. Bergen, author of, "What the F," talks about how there are very blurred lines between words classified as profane and words that are perfectly okay to say. He also points out that there is no evidence to say that exposure to profanity harms children, but slurs that are directed at people because of their racial, ethnic or sexual identities are. Michael Adams, author of, "In praise of Profanity," talks about how even though we are in "The Age of Profanity" now, it won't last for long because the future of swearing belongs to slurs. On the other hand, he talks about fearing a future where "nothing will be obscene, nothing profane and nothing taboo," because of how socially acceptable and common profanity has become.

Scientist discuss why humans enjoy swearing so much and what actually happens in our brains when we do use curse words.

In this article they talk about how certain words can dampen the effect of negative emotions. Furthermore they talk about how talking about how you feel can often improve your mood.

In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don't like. Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American "Where were you born?," because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might "trigger" a recurrence of past trauma. The current movement is largely about emotional well-being. More than the last, it presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into "safe spaces" where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable.

Charting linguistic change was once a painstakingly slow task, but a new analysis of nearly one billion Tweets - presented on 17 April 2018 at the Evolang International Conference on Language Evolution in Torun, Poland - now offers us an unprecedented glimpse of this process in action. According to this new research, most of the more recent coinages will have originated in one of five distinct hotspots that are driving American English through continual change. More than 20% of Americans were using Twitter at the time of the study - and each Tweet is timestamped and geocoded, offering precise information on the time and place that particular terms entered conversations. The researcher behind the study, Jack Grieve at the University of Birmingham, UK, analysed more than 980 million Tweets in total - consisting of 8.9 billion words - posted between October 2013 and November 2014, and spanning 3,075 of the 3,108 US counties. From this huge dataset, Grieve first identified any terms that were rare at the beginning of the study (occurring less than once per billion words in the last quarter of 2013) but which had then steadily risen in popularity over the course of the following year. He then filtered the subsequent list for proper nouns (such as Timehop) and those appearing in commercial adverts, and he also removed any words that were already in Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Acronyms, however, were included. The result was a list of 54 terms, which covered everything from sex and relationships (such as "baeless" - a synonym for single), people's appearance ("gainz" to describe the increased muscle mass from bulking up at the gym), and technology ("celfie" - an alternative spelling of selfie). Others reflected the infiltration of Japanese culture (such as "senpai", which means teacher or master). They also described general feelings, like "litt" (or "litty" - which means impressive or good - or affirmations such as "yaaaas

"Catholics throughout the English-speaking world on Sunday left behind words they have prayed for nearly four decades... The new translation, which alters some of the most familiar phrases of the Catholic liturgy, is praised by church officials as more authentic, more faithful, more accurate, and more reverential. ... [and] bemoaned by critics as being too slavish to the Latin, and in the process abandoning some of the ecumenical goals that influenced the last translation... And the Vatican rejected efforts to make the text more gender-neutral in places, sticking with the male pronouns used in Latin."

"The idea that Eskimos have many more words for snow than English speakers is a myth." See also: Language Log's collection of posts on the topic: http://j.mp/dnmNNc

Africanized versions of the Arabic alphabet are collectively called "Ajami." Much as the Latin-based alphabet is used to write many languages, including English, Ajami is not a language itself, but the alphabetic script used to write a language: Arabic-derived letters to write a non-Arabic-in this case, African-language. "Ajami" derives from the Arabic a'jamiy, which means "foreigner" or, more specifically, "non-Arab." Historically, Arabs used the word to refer to all things Persian or non-Arab, a usage they borrowed from the ancient Greeks. Yet over the last few centuries, across Islamic Africa, "Ajami" came to mean an African language written in Arabic script that was often adapted phonetically to facilitate local usages and pronunciations across the continent, from the Ethiopian highlands in the east to the lush jungles of Sierra Leone in the west. The use of Ajami is tied to the religious spread of Islam. From its beginning, Islam was a literate religion. Iqra' ("read") is the first word of God's revelations to Muhammad that became the Qur'an. Knowledge of Islam meant knowledge of the revealed word of God: the Qur'an. Consequently, wherever Islam went, it established centers of learning, usually attached to mosques, where children learned to read and write Arabic in much the same way that European and American children have often been taught literacy by using the Bible. For members of African societies where oral tradition predominated, Arabic was the first written language to which they had been exposed.

As language evolves and new terms enter the mainstream, teenagers are often blamed for debasing linguistic standards. In some cases, their preferred forms of communication-like text messaging-are attacked. But, teens don't actually influence language as much as is often claimed. That's one of the key findings in the latest linguistic research by Mary Kohn, an assistant professor of English at Kansas State University. How much a person's vernacular changes over time may have as much to do with personality and social standing as it has to do with age. The extent to which teenagers are credited with (or blamed for) driving lasting change to language is, she says, "grossly overstated." The same factors that prompt teens to experiment with new language are applicable to people at many stages of life.

This article is essentially explaining that teens aren't the main cause for a dramatic change in our language but actually innovators bringing in new words into our daily vocabulary. It also says that everybody can change language, as some words become "dated" and others don't. Teens aren't the only ones to blame for modern lingo.

"[W]hen you can't tell if word X is a noun or a verb, that means X is a state of mind... Going by this graph from the Google Ngram viewer, it looks like the prom is still well in the lead, but EW is right that people have begun to use plain old prom a lot more in the last decade."

It takes just one-tenth of a second for our brains to begin to recognize emotions conveyed by vocalizations; apparently human brains pay more attention when emotions are embedded in vocalizations rather than in speech. Participants were able to detect vocalizations of happiness (i.e., laughter) more quickly than vocal sounds conveying either anger or sadness. Vocalizations displaying anger, however, are more resonant than those displaying other emotions: both produced ongoing brain activity that lasted longer than either of the other emotions: "listeners engage in sustained monitoring of angry voices, irrespective of the form they take, to grasp the significance of potentially threatening events." More anxious individuals also have a faster and more heightened response to emotional voices in general than people who are less anxious.

Donald Trump, who often talks about "my beautiful family" and "lasting relationships," is a rather feminine-speaker. But Trump is also prone to speaking in overtly masculine ways (for example using phrases such as "absolutely destroy"). There are also times in which Trump uses language alienating to all people (regardless of gender); examples of such words include "moron," "imbecile," and "loser."

Psychologists who analyzed video footage of a female chimpanzee, a female bonobo and a female human infant in a study to compare different types of gestures at comparable stages of communicative development found remarkable similarities among the three species. Gestures made by all three species included reaching, pointing with fingers or the head, and raising the arms to ask to be picked up. The researchers called "striking" the finding that the gestures of all three species were "predominantly communicative," Greenfield said. To be classified as communicative, a gesture had to include eye contact with the conversational partner, be accompanied by vocalization (non-speech sounds) or include a visible behavioral effort to elicit a response. The same standard was used for all three species. For all three, gestures were usually accompanied by one or more behavioral signs of an intention to communicate. At the beginning stage of communication development, gesture was the primary mode of communication for human infant, baby chimpanzee and baby bonobo. The child progressed much more rapidly in the development of symbols. Words began to dominate her communication in the second half of the study, while the two apes continued to rely predominantly on gesture. "This was the first indication of a distinctive human pathway to language," Greenfield said. All three species increased their use of symbols, as opposed to gestures, as they grew older, but this change was far more pronounced for the human child. The child's transition from gesture to symbol could be a developmental model of the evolutionary pathway to human language and thus evidence for the "gestural origins of human language," Greenfield said. While gesture may be the first step in language evolution, the psychologists also found evidence that the evolutionary pathway from gesture to human language included the "co-evolution of gestural and vocal communication." Most of the child's gestures were accompanied b

Information set to music, suggests research, is better retained, as it taps into time- honored strategies that help information stick. Tales that last for many generations tend to describe concrete actions rather than abstract concepts. They use powerful visual images. They are sung or chanted. And they employ patterns of sound: alliteration, assonance, repetition and, most of all, rhyme. A study by Rubin showed that when two words in a ballad are linked by rhyme, contemporary college students remember them better than non-rhyming words. Such universal characteristics of oral narratives are, in effect, mnemonics-memory aids that people developed over time "to make use of the strengths and avoid the weaknesses of human memory," as Rubin puts it. Songs and rhymes can be used to remember all kinds of information. A study just published in the journal Memory and Cognition finds that adults learned a new language more effectively when they sang it.