Language and Languages
‘Parentese’ Is Truly a Lingua Franca, Global Study Finds
We’ve all seen it, we’ve all cringed at it, we’ve all done it ourselves: talked to a baby like it was, you know, a baby. “Ooo, hellooooo baby!” you say, your voice lilting like a rapturously accommodating Walmart employee. Baby is utterly baffled by your unintelligible warble and your shamelessly doofus grin, but “baby so […]
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Recording India’s Linguistic Riches as Leaders Push Hindi as Nation’s Tongue
DHARWAD, India — The task was gargantuan: assembling a team of more than 3,500 language specialists, academics and enthusiastic amateurs to determine just how many distinct languages still exist in India, a country of stunning linguistic diversity. Ganesh Narayan Devy has been obsessed with that question since, as a young scholar of literature, he came […]
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‘Allinllachu.’ Google Translate Adds Quechua to Its Platform.
LIMA — When Irma Alvarez Ccoscco heard that the language she has spoken her entire life, Quechua, had been added to Google Translate, she hurried to her computer to try it out. “I said: ‘This is it. The day has finally arrived,’” Ms. Alvarez Ccoscco, a poet, teacher and digital activist, recalled in a phone […]
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For Russian-Speaking Ukrainians, Language Clubs Offer Way to Defy Invaders
LVIV, Ukraine — The teacher sounded her words slowly, careful to show which syllable to stress: Eyebrow. Cheekbones. Hair. The students, arranged in a semicircle around her, parroted them back. But they were not there to learn a foreign tongue: Aged 11 to 70, they were Ukrainians, in Ukraine, trying to master the official language […]
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A.I. Is Mastering Language. Should We Trust What It Says?
But as GPT-3’s fluency has dazzled many observers, the large-language-model approach has also attracted significant criticism over the last few years. Some skeptics argue that the software is capable only of blind mimicry — that it’s imitating the syntactic patterns of human language but is incapable of generating its own ideas or making complex decisions, […]
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