Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Learning the intricacies of human languages is hard even for human children and non-native speakers - but it's particularly difficult for AI. Scientists have already taught computers how to do simple tasks, like translating one language to another or searching for keywords. Artificial intelligence has gotten better at solving these narrow problems. But now scientists are tackling harder problems, like how to build AI algorithms that can piece together bits of information to give a coherent answer for more complicated, nuanced questions. "Language is the ultimate frontier of AI research because you can express any thought or idea in language," states Stanford computer science professor Yoav Shoham. "It's as rich as human thinking." For Shoham, the excitement about artificial intelligence lies not only in what it can do - but also in what it can't. "It's not just mimicking the human brain in silicon, but asking what traits are so innately human that we don't think we can emulate them on a computer," Shoham said. "Our creativity, fairness, emotions, all the stuff we take for granted - machines can't even come close."

Straddling the imaginary border between the Balkans and Central Europe, Slovenia is home to two million citizens united by a common language. But this wasn't always the case. For about six hundred years, the Slovene lands were the domain of the Habsburgs, with the occasional appearance by the French, Italians, Hungarians, and Serbs. The Slovene language-and with it the core of Slovene identity-should by all rights have disappeared long ago, subsumed by the much stronger languages and political powers surrounding it. The language survived thanks to the efforts of many people, from the 16th-century protestants who first wrote it down to the 18th- and 19th-century intellectuals who coaxed it out of the church and spread it among the people. Among their arsenal of weapons: a cookbook, wielded by one relentlessly determined priest, Valentin Vodnik. Vodnik was a man of boundless energy, curiosity, and drive: Besides his work as a priest and later a high-school teacher and headmaster, he was fluent in half a dozen languages, wrote some of the first Slovene poetry, published the first Slovene newspaper, and began corresponding with intellectuals in Slovene. Vodnik's mission was popularizing and elevating the reputation of the language at a time when educated Slovenes mostly spoke German, considering their native tongue to be the vernacular of poor illiterate farmers, unfit for polite society and incapable of expressing complex ideas.

Article discusses the importance of preserving endangered indigenous languages: it's not only the languages at risk but also the world views they express - tens of thousands of years of accumulated ecological, biological and cultural knowledge. "Every last word means another lost world," is how the Living Tongue Institute for Endangered Languages puts it.

This is about how telehealth is being used during this pandemic, and the complications with expressing people's thoughts over video chat

Since the creation of advertisements, its hard for people to go a day without seeing at least one ad on TV, outside, or online. It's like impossible. However with the increasing amount of advertisements people see everyday, research shows that it is harder to retain what you saw. As a result, advertisers are reverting to a newer method called linguistic synaesthesia which is a type of metaphor created by combining linguistic expressions which evoke multiple senses at one time. Read the article to find out more examples of linguistic synaesthesia.

This article is about how being out of school for half a year could change children's relationship with formal expression. Learning online is not nearly as effective as in-school instruction and this article talks about how that may affect young students in the future. It also talks about how children who speak a non-English language at home will become more proficient in that language due to the nation-wide stay at home orders. This article highlights the benefits and drawbacks that will affect young children and their language due to being in quarantine.

This article talks about how people will be affected by the Coronavirus linguistically. It reasons that now people are staying at home, their home languages can be better preserved. The article also mentions that online teaching is not as effective as interpersonal teaching because young students won't be learning kinesthetically and will only be learning passively through a screen. This holds true for me, as certain topics are better explained to me in a classroom setting.

This article discusses the importance of sincere apologies and the consequences of over apologizing. It also lists other alternatives to apologizing (ex. expressing gratitude).

This article explains what a metaphor is and why metaphors are important. In this article you learn about how metaphors can be very effective in communicating tangible and abstract information. Tips and examples for making effective metaphors are also given in this article. For example, visual words are most effective when communicating.

Ubiquitous video technology and social media have given deaf people a new way to communicate. They're using it to transform American Sign Language. For more than a century, the telephone has helped shape how people communicate. But it had a less profound impact on American Sign Language, which relies on both hand movements and facial expressions to convey meaning. Until, that is, phones started to come with video screens. Over the past decade or so, smartphones and social media have allowed ASL users to connect with one another as never before. Face-to-face interaction, once a prerequisite for most sign language conversations, is no longer required. Video has also given users the opportunity to teach more people the language - there are thriving ASL communities on YouTube and TikTok - and the ability to quickly invent and spread new signs, to reflect either the demands of the technology or new ways of thinking.

Chinese honorifics (尊稱zūnchēng) and honorific language (敬辭jìngcí，謙辭qiāncí，婉辭wǎncí，客套語kètàoyǔ，雅語yáyǔ), are words, word constructs, and expressions in the Chinese language that convey self-deprecation, social respect, politeness, or deference

Issues of equality and acceptance of transgender and nonbinary people - along with challenges to their rights - have become a major topic in the headlines. These issues can involve words and ideas and identities that are new to some. That's why we've put together a glossary of terms relating to gender identity. Our goal is to help people communicate accurately and respectfully with one another. Proper use of gender identity terms, including pronouns, is a crucial way to signal courtesy and acceptance.

This journal is about how meaning in music can be communicated. Many people say that they express themselves through music, so this journal goes in-depth about how different people communicate their thoughts through music.

"In everyday life in America, for example, I hear people expressing the same sentiment… 'What is done is done,', 'Let it go and move on,'," she says. Japanese commonly use a phrase, "shikata ga nai", for situations that are generally negative but leave you no alternative but to get over it. Its loose English translation is "it can't be helped".This phrase - and the sentiment behind it - raises some interesting questions. Is there something useful about the meaning of phrases like shou ga nai? Is there anything freeing about accepting frustrating situations, rather than trying to constantly fight them? This article discussed the benefits of phrases like this.

While this video has been posted here on the Diigo page before, the bookmark is from 2011 and has very few relevant tags. This short film has many different voices from our community, and it provides the most authentic sounding pidgin that I've been able to find on Youtube, as it shows ordinary people just talking and expressing their relationship with the language, and as it is not performative. I personally discovered it when trying to explain pidgin to a friend from the mainland, and it seems to be a very good tool for providing a solid foundation of understanding about pidgin. Notable speakers within the video include linguist Kent Sakoda, who discusses the formation of pidgins as a whole, the formation of HCE as a result of plantations here in Hawaii, the formation of a few particular common phrases that arose as a combination of various languages, and how HCE is something that binds people together as a community here in Hawaii as well as Pastor Earl Morihara, who speaks on the importance of pidgin to him in a personal sense, elaborating that it's "da language of my heart," and that it comes naturally to him when speaking with others in the Hawaii community.

This essay compares the controversies surrounding actions taken by two school boards-one in Hawai'i and the other in Oakland-in their attempts to help students in their districts attain fluency in standard English. Public reactions expressed during each of these two incidents demonstrated a general lack of understanding about languages and nonstandard dialects. The myths and characterizations about Hawai'i Creole English and African American Vernacular English, and the issues these two stigmatized dialects have raised, point to educational policy implications concerning academic achievement and the politics of language.

This is a really useful essay in highlighting linguistic research re: how to effectively instruct speakers of non-standard varieties of English, e.g. AAVE and HCE. Nice find!

This is an article about the experiences, inner thoughts, and struggles of a girl who is deaf. From this article, I learned and realized many things such as how difficult lipreading can be. Originally, I was amazed at how deaf people could read lips and thought they could understand every word someone said. However, I learned from this article that that is NOT true and things such as accents and a lack of expression can make it difficult for one to decipher what is being said.

This article talks about general language disorders, how to detect impairments, options for treatment, and much more. More specifically, one portion of the article focuses on receptive versus expressive forms of language, and the characteristics that fall beneath each of these categories. Lastly, the article addresses how parents can help their child succeed from a young age.

SPANISH LANGUAGE TEXT. There is no English translation that I know of for this article. Comprised of eleven interviews of fairly "high-class" individuals (including authors, journalists, doctors, lawyers, professors, religious officials, and more), the focus of this article is profanity, and whether or not said individuals use profanity while speaking. Interestingly enough, eight out of the eleven individuals used profanity fairly regularly. Most of those eight were fairly shameful about their use of profanity, or only used them in particular contexts-including, interestingly enough, during homilies/sermons. Only one person (Pilar de Río) declared that they used profanity freely and enthusiastically, while others, though admitting the merits of such language (particularly its expressive power), did not view them in such a positive light. Two additional members of the eleven interviewees primarily used "muletas" or "muletillas," or, as we know them in English, crutches or filler words. This article is quite interesting if examining profanity in different cultures and languages, as it is a Spanish-language article from El Ciervo, the longest-running magazine in Spain's history. Do note, again, that this source is a SPANISH LANGUAGE TEXT, and that some proficiency in the language will be needed to interpret this text, even with the help of online dictionaries.

I thought was a really interesting and helpful website. The entries are short but you can request access to full articles as well. It has articles on LANGUAGE EFFECTS ON PERSONAL IDENTITY, PROFANITY AND MEDIA, PRAGMATISM OF CURSE WORDS, YOUTH SLANG EXPRESSION AROUND THE WORLD, IMPACTS OF "BAD" ENGLISH, UNCONVENTIONAL PHRASES AND AFRICAN RACE.