In 1975, the Dutch mathematician, poet, linguist and Esperantist Dr. W. A. Verloren Van Themaat wrote to Sir Bernard Crick about the possible influence of Esperanto on George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. This article explores the subject. En 1975, la...

This article in the magazine Wired asks: how do you communicate with an intelligent entity you know nothing about? Humans are the only species on Earth endowed with advanced mathematical ability and a fully fledged faculty of language, but are these hallmarks of...

While English is the language of science – precise and succinct – the flowery nature of Spanish contributes to a culture that supports emotional expression. In doing so, it can help its speakers manage the responses to stress. A therapist in this article uses...

Researchers at the University of Copenhagen trawled through 3.5 million fiction and non-fiction books published in English between 1900 and 2008, to see if there is a difference between the types of words used to describe men and women in literature. They confirmed a...

OpenAI’s GPT-3 and other neural nets can now write original prose with mind-boggling fluency – a development that could have profound implications for the future, as discussed in this fascinating article in the New York Times. Neŭraj retoj kiel GPT-3 de OpenAI nun...

A relatively recent study shows that apes and monkeys can track relationships between sounds in the same way as humans, indicating that this ability predates the evolution of language itself by at least 40 million years. Relative lastatempa studaĵo montras, ke...

An International Colloquium on language interactions in the classroom and on the construction of knowledge in school subjects will take place on 6–7 October 2022 at the University of Lille on the Pont de Bois site, in Villeneuve d’Ascq. Internacia Kolokvo pri lingvaj...

Linguistics examines conveyance, processing and the evolution of natural languages, and computer science applies the same questions to programming. Both fields deal with syntax, semantics and instructions, and how people perceive them. This short article explains how...

The 10th Global Conference on Linguistics and Foreign Language Teaching (LINELT-2022) will be held in Lara-Antalya, Turkey from 12th to 14th May, both online and face to face. La 10-a Monda Konferenco pri Lingvoscienco kaj Instruado de Fremdaj Lingvoj (LINELT-2022)...

The World Esperanto Association has announced three examination periods for 2022 in relation to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: - In June–July Esperanto exams can be done online: anyone can sit the examination from the comfort of their home....

With support from ESF, Guilherme Fians has published an article Prefigurative Politics (a type of strategy for social movements) in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology. This article of 18 pages provides a critical review of the social-science bibliography and...

According to a study published by The Royal Society, gestures of chimpanzees follow the same mathematical patterns as are seen in human language. For example, patterns consistent with Zipf’s law of abbreviation (which predicts an inverse relationship between word...

Putin has suggested Ukrainians and Russians share one language, but the differences amount to much more than what he dismissed in 2021 as “regional language peculiarities”. This article discusses the political implications, concluding that by looking for “unity” of...

The annual Polyglot Gathering is the world’s biggest international event for polyglots and language lovers. This year it takes place from 28 April to 1 May, and individual members of UEA are entitled to a 40% discount (paying 30 euros instead of 50) if they register...

In 1929, the German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler observed that when Spanish speakers were shown a rounded shape and a spiky one and asked which one they thought was called baluba and which takete, most associated baluba with roundedness and takete with spikiness....

The International Conference on Psychology, Language and Teaching, taking place in Boston on April 21–22, aims to bring together leading academic scientists, researchers and research scholars to exchange and share their experiences and research results. La Internacia...