#humanlanguage โ Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #humanlanguage, aggregated by home.social.
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#Birdsong and #WhaleSong show patterns similar to #HumanLanguage
by University of Edinburgh
edited by Sadie Harley, reviewed by Robert Egan
"An international team of researchers has uncovered a previously undetected structure in the birdsong of #BengaleseFinches that has the same statistical patterns found in human languages.
"The songbirdsโfamous for their complex, learned songsโorganize their songs using the same mathematical formula found in human speech, a trait that has developed over time and makes complex communication easier to learn and pass from one generation to the next.
"The findings, published in the journal Science Advances, build on the team's previous discovery that #HumpbackWhales also rely on a similar systematic structure.
Language has long been considered a uniquely human trait, with features that mark it as distinct from the communication of all other species.
The findings suggest that some of language's most fundamental building blocks may not be uniquely human after all, but rather a universal feature of learned communication, the researchers say."
Read more:
https://phys.org/news/2026-08-birdsong-whale-song-patterns-similar.html#Nature #Communication #BirdLanguage #WhaleLanguage #LanguagePatterns #Linguistics #Zoology
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A Forgotten Wave of Extinction May Have Erased Thousands of Human Languages
Photo: (Yale University/Wikimedia) Around 7,500 spoken and signed languages are used worldwide today. Yet this extraordinary diversity may represent only a fraction of the linguistic richness humanity once possessed. A new modeling study published in Science suggests language diversity reached a forgotten golden age between 1,000 and 3,000 years ago, when tens of thousands of languages may have coexisted. What followed was a dramatic decline that appears to have begun long before European [โฆ] -
๐ฏ ๐ช๐ผ๐ฟ๐ฑ ๐ฅ๐ฒ๐๐ถ๐ฒ๐: โ๐ช๐ต๐ฎ๐ ๐๐ถ๐ป๐ฑ ๐ผ๐ณ ๐๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ฎ๐๐๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ ๐๐ฟ๐ฒ ๐ช๐ฒ?โ ๐ฏ๐ ๐ก๐ผ๐ฎ๐บ ๐๐ต๐ผ๐บ๐๐ธ๐ -
Chomsky's argument that human language and cognition are conditioned by biology is briefly unpacked as he traces both the nature of external (E-) and internal (I- / grammar) language facility and the history of thinkers who wrestled with it. Thick but enlightening.
#books #bookreviews #noamchomsky #whatkindofcreaturesarewe #linguistics #biolinguistics #epistemology #humanlanguage