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Dr Katie Slocombe and Dr Anne Schel, of the Department of Psychology at York, examined the degree of intentionality wild chimpanzees have over their alarm calls. The study shows that chimpanzees appear to produce certain alarm calls intentionally in a tactical and goal directed way--they are not simply fear-based reactions. In Uganda, the researchers presented wild chimpanzees with a moving snake model and monitored their vocal and behavioural responses. They found that the chimpanzees were more likely to produce alarm calls when close friends arrived in the vicinity. They looked at and monitored group members both before and during the production of calls and critically, they continued to call until all group members were safe from the predator. Together these behaviours indicate the calls are produced intentionally to warn others of the danger. Dr Slocombe said: "These behaviours indicate that these alarm calls were produced intentionally to warn others of danger and thus the study shows a key similarity in the mechanisms involved in the production of chimpanzee vocalisations and human language. "Our results demonstrate that certain vocalisations of our closest living relatives qualify as intentional signals, in a directly comparable way to many great ape gestures, indicating that language may have originated from a multimodal vocal-gestural communication system."

East Africa's elephants face few threats in their savanna home, aside from humans and lions. But the behemoths are terrified of African bees, and with good reason. An angry swarm can sting elephants around their eyes and inside their trunks and pierce the skin of young calves. Now, a new study shows that the pachyderms utter a distinctive rumble in response to the sound of bees, the first time an alarm call has been identified in elephants. … [T]he study suggests that this alarm call isn't just a generalized vocalization but means specifically, "Bees!" says Lucy King, a postgraduate zoologist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and the study's lead author. When they hear buzzing bees, the pachyderms turn and run away, shaking their heads while making a call that King terms the "bee rumble."

Even in America, there are different ways people speak English from different parts of the US. This article talks about some of the linguistic differences of people speaking in the US. There was a survey conducted by Harvard linguist Bert Vaux in 2003 to understand some of the differences in the way people talk. Generally, people in Atlanta call a sweetened carbonated beverage "coke" whereas in the Midwest, it's called pop, and it's called soda everywhere else. In New York, people say waiting "on line" rather than saying "in line." And the term "anymore" means different things in different parts of the country. Some people use it to mean "nowadays" and some use it to mean "already." In some parts of the country, there is a term for when it rains while still being sunny. People in the Northeast call it a "sunshower," but Southerners call it "the devil is beating his wife" and most of the rest of the country has no name for this at all. Finally, the northern half of the country is more likely to pronounce the second "a" in pajamas like "jam" whereas the southern half of the country is more likely to pronounce the second "a" in pajamas as "jam." This information is supposed to be useful in helping to figure out where the lines are between different American dialects and can also help to predict where someone is from.

This article explains the reason why we call our parents mom and dad. The article gives examples of different ways to say mom and dad in different languages in a table, to show how similar the sounds of mom and dad are across those languages. The article then explained how social constructs and culture keeps us from calling our mom or dad their legal name.

This article discusses why children call their parents 'Mom' and 'Dad', and why not other names. It talks about how the role sounds play, and the role that cultural rules play in why most people refer their parents in this way.

People have always spoken differently from how they write, and texting is actually talking with your fingers Texting has long been bemoaned as the downfall of the written word, "penmanship for illiterates," as one critic called it. To which the proper response is LOL.

This article explores the argument that texting might be ruining and defacing the importance behind the english language. It explains how texting has really become its own language. It has created a different type of grammar, conventions, and patterns to writing.

When you text someone, are you writing or talking? People have always spoken differently from the way they write. This article says that texting properly is actually closer to spoken language than it is to writing, and that it is a new kind of talking and is developing its own kind of grammar and conventions. It uses "LOL" to give an example of how the texting language is changing, just like spoken languages are constantly evolving.

Prairie dogs have different alarm calls for different predators and can also indicate the size, color, speed, etc of the predator. In fact, it was found that the animals could combine and restructure their calls to describe things they hadn't seen before. This was found by having different breeds of dog (a golden retriever, a husky, a Dalmatian, a cocker spaniel) wander through the prairie dog territory one at a time and recording the resulting alarm calls; the calls highly varied even though the 'predator' was of the same predator class. They also showed different calls when researchers wearing different colored shirts walked through the territory (the same for different heights and walking speeds).

Some of the "2016 is awful" rhetoric might be about the way we all consumed the headlines this year. Amy Mitchell, director of Journalism Research at the Pew Research Center, says what we've been witnessing in news consumption trends over the last few years has changed us. "A lot of the shift to digital is presenting a news experience that is more mixed in with other kinds of activities," she says. "You don't necessarily go online looking for news each and every time. Somebody shares it, somebody emails it to you, somebody texts a link. And so many Americans are bumping into the news throughout the course of the day." Nikki Usher, a professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, calls this recent phenomenon "ambient journalism," or "when you're constantly plugged in through social media and you're constantly online and engaged in some way." And that - that constant bumping into news and online discord, that constant engagement - over time, it becomes an assault. And, Usher says, besides that aggression of immediacy, a lot of the headlines we consumed this year, particularly about the election, pushed a certain narrative: a nation, and even a world, completely and disastrously divided, perhaps beyond repair. "Lots of crappy, bad things happen every year," she says, "but you aren't told over and over again that this just shows us how bad everything is."

As far as we know, humans are still the only ones with language. But what separates language from communication? Why can't we assume that whales, with their elaborate songs, are simply speaking "whale-ese"? To be considered a true language, there are a few elements that are usually considered to be essential, says Kershenbaum. For one, it must be learned rather than instinctive - both whales and birds have this piece covered. For instance, killer whale calves learn a repertoire of calls from their mothers, and the sounds gradually evolve from erratic screams to adult-like pulsed calls and whistles. What holds whales and other animals back from language is that there is a limit to what they can express. There are only so many calls that each may convey different emotions, but only we have an unlimited ability to express abstract ideas.

In this article, scientist Wilkie Freud followed a group of chimpanzees around to learn more about the origin of language. The human lineage broke from chimpanzees roughly 7.9 million years ago. The study they found was that the chimpanzees use language when necessary, like when a snake is seen. They will shout an alarm call to warn other about the danger. They also seem to grunt when they enjoy food. This shows how chimpanzees and humans have similar but very different types of language.

The etymology of some words. Amazing how things have changed.

Interesting article. There may be, however, counter-explanations for this combined phrase. Hip was cited by Samuel Johnson in the mid-1700s as a variant of the Latin phrase "eho, heus": an exclamation calling for attention (_The Nature of Roman Comedy_, Duckworth 1994). And hooray, according to the OED, is a variation of hurrah (int. and n.), a word used as early as 1716, a century before the anti-Semitic forces took it up as a rallying cry. Have snipped the following definitions from the OED: Word #1. Hip (int.): hip, int. (and n.4) 1. 'An exclamation or calling to one; the same as the Latin eho, heus!' (Johnson). 1752 in Ainsworth's Thes. Linguæ Latinæ (ed. 4) 1768-74 A. Tucker Light of Nature (1852) I. 34 Perhaps Dr. Hartley‥may give me a hip, and call out, 'Prithee, friend, do not think to slip so easily by me'. 2. An exclamation used (usually repeated thrice) to introduce a united cheer: hence as n. 1827 W. Hone Every-day Bk. 12 To toss off the glass, and huzza after the 'hip! hip! hip!' of the toast giver. a1845 T. Hood Sniffing a Birthday xiv, No flummery then from flowery lips, No three times three and hip-hip-hips! 1849 Thackeray Pendennis (1850) I. xvii. 154 'Here's Mrs. Smirke's good health: Hip, hip, hurray!' hip-hurrah v. (also hip-hip-hurrah) 1832 Examiner 609/2 One set of men 'hip hurrah' and rattle decanter stoppers. 1871 T. Carlyle in Lett. & Memorials J. W. Carlyle (1883) I. 116 In the course of the installation dinner, at some high point of the hep-hep hurrahing. Word #2: Hurrah: Pronunciation: /hʊˈrɑː/ /həˈrɑː/ /hʊˈreɪ/ /həˈreɪ/ Forms: Also 16- hurra, 17 hurrea, whurra, 18 hooray, ( hooroar), hourra. Etymology: A later substitute for huzza v. (not in Johnson, Ash, Walker; in Todd 1818), perhaps merely due to onomatopoeic modification, but possibly influenced by some foreign shouts: compare Swedish, Danish, Low German

Everyone needs a copy editor. Today, the Texas Republican Party is probably wishing it had one, too. Check out this sentence from the just-adopted 2016 party platform: As Texas Monthly rightly points out, the sentence actually says that homosexual behavior "has been ordained by God in the Bible, recognized by our nations founders, and shared by the majority of Texans."

There are two hypotheses to why note-taking is beneficial in the first place. The first idea is called the encoding hypothesis, which says that when a person is taking notes, "the processing that occurs" will improve "learning and retention." The second, called the external-storage hypothesis, is that you learn by being able to look back at your notes, or even the notes of other people. A 2014 study published in _Psychological Science_, co-written by Pam A. Mueller of Princeton University and Daniel M. Oppenheimer of the University of California, Los Angeles, suggests that taking longhand notes may have superior external storage as well as superior encoding functions, in comparison to taking notes via laptop.

University of Washington students have created gloves called SignAloud. These gloves sense hand motions and translate the meanings, allowing more people to understand sign language.

With texting, we tend to play this ridiculous game that revolves around who has the power in the conversation. The person who has yet to respond leaves the other person on tenterhooks, wondering if that was a dumb thing to say, if they were just scared off, if they're really on a date with someone much more interesting right now - any number of possibilities, really.

In this study, we continuously monitored Egyptian fruit bats for months, recording audio and video around-the-clock. We analyzed almost 15,000 vocalizations, which accompanied the everyday interactions of the bats, and were all directed toward specific individuals, rather than broadcast. We found that bat vocalizations carry ample information about the identity of the emitter, the context of the call, the behavioral response to the call, and even the call's addressee.

"a new citizen science project for you to play with - matching up whalesong to try and analyze the watery leviathans' language... Each family of killer whales appears to have a distinct "dialect" that it uses to communicate, and closely related families appear to share calls ... Your task is to pick the one that's closest to the original call, with the help of visualizations of what the audio sounds like." The website is whale.fm.

"Chimpanzees appear to consider who they are "talking to" before they call out. Researchers found that wild chimps that spotted a poisonous snake were more likely to make their "alert call" in the presence of a chimp that had not seen the threat. This indicates that the animals "understand the mindset" of others."

"But the "want you to listen; it's important" call gets threaded into almost every paragraph of the speech and amplified as the speech goes on. Clinton adds, among other asides, "Let me ask you something"; "Think about that"; "Let's think about it"; "I am telling you"; "Don't you ever forget"; "Wait, you need to know"; "You all need to listen carefully"; and perhaps the clincher, "You need to tell every voter where you live about this." It's a teacher's approach and more: It's the guy grabbing you by the shirt collar, demanding that you hear him and that you then go out and spread the Word."