Tag • #language

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‘So uniquely her’: where did Kamala Harris’s self-help speaking style come from?

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 2 days ago - 17:00

The vice-president blends a prosecutor’s precision with pearls of wisdom. Experts shed light on her language

“What can be, unburdened by what has been” is a phrase Kamala Harris uses so often there are minutes-long supercuts available to watch on YouTube. It even has its own Wikipedia page . In other speeches, Harris has also expressed a belief in “the significance of the passage of time” and a desire to “honor the women who made history throughout history”.

Since becoming the presumptive nominee, Harris has invigorated the Democratic party. It’s not only that she’s a much younger candidate than Biden; she also has a stump speech style that embraces metaphor and a new age vernacular not often heard in national politics. The meme accounts love to quote it. It’s even led some to draw comparisons with Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s portrayal of Selina Meyer, the frothy politician in Veep . (In one episode, Meyer stumbles through a speech saying: “We are the United States of America because we are united … and we are states.”)

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A New York accent in ancient Rome? So what, it’s no less accurate than speaking in RP | Rebecca Rideal

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 18 July - 09:00 · 1 minute

Denzel Washington has been accused of inauthenticity in Gladiator II. But why is upper-class, southern English considered the norm?

“Whose head could I give you that would satisfy this fury?” asks Denzel Washington’s crafty Macrinus in the long-awaited trailer for Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II . With its medley of aquatic gladiatorial games and charging battle rhinos, a vengeful Paul Mescal, a wearied Pedro Pascal, imperial Rome’s answer to Tweedledum (Joseph Quinn) and Tweedledee (Fred Hechinger), and Connie Nielsen providing an enticing link to the previous film, the trailer looks and sounds epic. So of course some viewers have come out in a fury.

A chief complaint appears to be Washington’s use of his natural New York accent, with one observer asking: “How did Ridley Scott … allow Academy Award-winning actor Denzel Washington to do a NY accent in a movie set in Ancient Rome?” Conversely, there seems to be little furore over the English accent of Quinn or Mescal’s loose adoption of what appears to be (from the trailer at least) received pronunciation – despite them being equally anachronistic. As it has been pointed out in the Hollywood Reporter, when combined with criticism of the music choice (Jay-Z and Kanye West’s No Church in the Wild), it “ starts to look rather dog whistle-y ”.

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Researchers track individual neurons as they respond to words

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 17 July - 19:39 · 1 minute

Enlarge / Human Neuron, Digital Light Microscope. (Photo By BSIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) (credit: BSIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

“Language is a huge field, and we are novices in this. We know a lot about how different areas of the brain are involved in linguistic tasks, but the details are not very clear,” says Mohsen Jamali, a computational neuroscience researcher at Harvard Medical School who led a recent study into the mechanism of human language comprehension.

“What was unique in our work was that we were looking at single neurons. There is a lot of studies like that on animals—studies in electrophysiology, but they are very limited in humans. We had a unique opportunity to access neurons in humans,” Jamali adds.

Probing the brain

Jamali’s experiment involved playing recorded sets of words to patients who, for clinical reasons, had implants that monitored the activity of neurons located in their left prefrontal cortex—the area that’s largely responsible for processing language. “We had data from two types of electrodes: the old-fashioned tungsten microarrays that can pick the activity of a few neurons; and the Neuropixel probes which are the latest development in electrophysiology,” Jamali says. The Neuropixels were first inserted in human patients in 2022 and could record the activity of over a hundred neurons.

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AI prompts can boost writers’ creativity but result in similar stories, study finds

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Friday, 12 July - 18:00

Ideas generated by ChatGPT can help writers who lack inherent flair but may mean there are fewer unique ideas

Once upon a time, all stories were written solely by humans. Now, researchers have found AI might help authors tell a tale.

A study suggests that ideas generated by the AI system ChatGPT can help boost the creativity of writers who lack inherent flair – albeit at the expense of variety.

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‘Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungs-aufgabenübertragungsgesetz’: how viral tongue-twisters lightened up German language

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Saturday, 29 June - 05:00

Song about bushy-bearded barbarians that took 144 takes sparks interest in often maligned language

German has provided some of the most jaw-straining single words in the history of human language. Fußbodenschleifmaschinenverleih (rental shop for floor-sanding machines), anyone? Not to mention
Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz , a late lamented state law for labelling meat.

Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer , a former defence minister with a dastardly difficult name to say, was long seen as a likely successor to the relatively pronounceable ex-chancellor, Angela Merkel . Kramp-Karrenbauer’s resignation as the conservatives’ party chief came as a relief to news presenters the world over, clearing the way for the tight three-syllabic Olaf Scholz. Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger , once a federal justice minister and the ultimate double-barrelled tongue-tripper, was not invited to join his cabinet.

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Fidlets, fingies and riding a doo: study sheds light on Antarctic English slang

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 20 June - 04:50

Dr Steph Kaefer spent three weeks documenting unique colloquialisms on the frozen continent after newcomers were struck by the distinctive vocabulary

If you know what it means to be a “fidlet” going for a “jolly” in your “doo”, then you are part of an exclusive club that speaks colloquial Antarctic English.

A New Zealand linguists doctorate graduate from the University of Canterbury has completed a world-first study into colloquial Antarctic English, spoken at the US, British and New Zealand Antarctic research stations.

While there have been previous literary studies into Antartica English vocabulary, Dr Steph Kaefer’s study marks the first time a researcher has visited Antarctica to document the unique colloquialisms used in daily life.

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Elephants may refer to each other by name

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 11 June - 20:31 · 1 minute

A group of African elephants, including adults and offspring, walk across a brown plain in front of a mountain.

Enlarge (credit: Buena Vista Images )

Lots of animals communicate with each other, from tiny mice to enormous whales . But none of those forms of communication share all but a small fraction of the richness of human language. Still, finding new examples of complex communications can tell us things about the evolution of language and what cognitive capabilities are needed for it.

On Monday, researchers report what may be the first instance of a human-like language ability in another species. They report that elephants refer to each other by individual names, and the elephant being referred to recognizes when it's being mentioned. The work could be replicated with a larger population and number of calls, but the finding is consistent with what we know about the sophisticated social interactions of these creatures.

What’s in a name?

We use names to refer to each other so often that it's possible to forget just how involved their use is. We recognize formal and informal names that refer to the same individual, even though those names often have nothing to do with the features or history of that person. We easily handle hundreds of names, including those of people we haven't interacted with in decades. And we do this in parallel with the names of thousands of places, products, items, and so on.

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Whale songs have features of language, but whales may not be speaking

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 22 May - 15:55 · 1 minute

A group of sperm whales and remora idle near the surface of the ocean.

Enlarge (credit: wildestanimal )

Whales use complex communication systems we still don’t understand, a trope exploited in sci-fi shows like Apple TV’s Extrapolations . That show featured a humpback whale (voiced by Meryl Streep) discussing Mahler’s symphonies with a human researcher via some AI-powered inter-species translation app developed in 2046.

We’re a long way from that future. But a team of MIT researchers has now analyzed a database of Caribbean sperm whales’ calls and has found there really is a contextual and combinatorial structure in there. But does it mean whales have a human-like language and we can just wait until Chat GPT 8.0 to figure out how to translate from English to Sperm-Whaleish? Not really.

One-page dictionary

“Sperm whales communicate using clicks. These clicks occur in short packets we call codas that typically last less than two seconds, containing three to 40 clicks,” said Pratyusha Sharma, a researcher at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the lead author of the study. Her team argues that codas are analogues of words in human language and are further organized in coda sequences that are analogues of sentences. “Sperm whales are not born with this communication system; it's acquired and changes over the course of time,” Sharma said.

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Single brain implant gives paralyzed man bilingual communication

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 20 May - 21:50 · 1 minute

Single brain implant gives paralyzed man bilingual communication

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

If things ultimately work out as hoped, brain implants will ultimately restore communication for those who have become paralyzed due to injury or disease. But we're a long way from that future, and the implants are currently limited to testing in clinical trials.

One of those clinical trials, based at the University of California, San Francisco, has now inadvertently revealed something about how the brain handles language, because one of the patients enrolled in the trial was bilingual, using English and Spanish. By tracking activity in the area of the brain where the intention to speak gets translated into control over the vocal tract, researchers found that both languages produce consistent signals in this area, so training the system to pick up English phrases would help improve its recognition of Spanish.

Making some noise

Understanding bilingualism is obviously useful for understanding how the brain handles language in general. The new paper describing the work also points out that restoring communications in multiple languages should be a goal for restoring communications to people. Bilingual people will often change languages based on different social situations or sometimes do so within a sentence in order to express themselves more clearly. They often describe bilingual abilities as a key component of their personalities.

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