Humans have been speaking a language for tens, hundreds, thousands of years. However, linguists, psychologists and historians are constantly making new discoveries about the ways in which we communicate. Linguists are tracking the new terms we invent for our modern lives while archaeologists search for the lost history of past languages and neuroscientists test new technologies that will allow us to bypass speech altogether and communicate directly from our brains. From the oldest alphabets to mind-reading implants, here are some of the coolest things we learned about language in 2024.
The “Ow” Factor
How do you say “oh” in languages around the world? If you choose a random language, it’s likely that this word for pain has the vowel sound “ah” or sounds made by combining it with other vowels, such as “ow” or “ouch”. The researchers he found that hidden commonality analyzing pain words in 131 languages. They suspect that the trend may come from the involuntary sounds humans make to express pain, which is also likely to have that “ah” vowel.
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The world around us often shapes the sounds of our language, although many of these effects are subtle. For example, there is the classic butterfly effectwhere people are more likely to call a rounded object “bouba” and a pointed one “kiki”. And researchers have recently shown that people around the world are more likely to associate the “R” sound with roughness and the “L” sound with smoothness.
Survival of the fittest
Humans, like all animals, evolve over time…like the languages we speak. But why do some words last for millennia, while others can disappear within a few generations? To help find out, the researchers orchestrated a giant game of “telephone” with thousands of English speakers. Participants read the stories, then rewrote them for other participants to read, and the researchers looked for patterns in the words that survived or were lost.
The researchers found that words acquired in childhood, such as “hand” or “uncle”, had an evolutionary advantage and would last longer. More concrete nouns fared better—”dog” lasted longer than “animal,” which lasted longer than “organism”—as did those that were emotionally arousing. This suggests that language may become more effective over time, but this does not mean that speaking to children is reduced. “Yes, we gravitate toward simple language, but then we also pick up the complex language we need,” says study author Fritz Breithaupt of Indiana University Bloomington.
Rewriting the alphabet
It may have been the first alphabet, which evolved into the Latin letters you are reading now a century older than you think. Researchers found a finger-sized clay cylinder from a Syrian tomb that may have been a gift tag. The artifact was dated to 2400 BC, five hundred years earlier and hundreds of kilometers from when the first alphabet, Proto-Sinaitic, was thought to have appeared.
However, the label contains a Proto-Sinaitic word: “silanu”, which may be a noun. Proto-Sinaitic letters were reworked from Egyptian hieroglyphics, whose symbols represented whole words and syllables instead of individual sounds. This discovery “changes the whole narrative of how the alphabet was introduced,” says Glenn Schwartz, the Johns Hopkins University archaeologist who discovered the artifact.
Brain reading implants
Only five years ago, the idea of a device that could turn thought into speech was science fiction. But today it is a reality. Casey Harrell, 40-year-old man, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), he has regained the ability to speak with his familyincluding his young daughter after having a series of electrodes implanted in her brain. The program chooses the wrong word only three percent of the time.
Harrell, who is part of a clinical trial led by the consortium called BrainGate, is not the first to try to communicate through a brain-computer interface, or BCI, but the huge success of his case could signal that the technology is ready for more widespread use. use it “It marks a milestone in the field of speech BCIs,” says Christian Herff, a computational neuroscientist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. “Today it has reached a level of quality that is of real use to patients.”
Closed captions provided by the brain
For people with synesthesia, letters can have colors, colors can have smells, and smells can have sounds. Synesthesia—the name given to these cross-sense connections—is not a disorder; it’s just another way of perceiving the world, one in which the senses can cross and become confused.
American scientificCopy editor Emily Makowski experiences a rare and fascinating kind of synesthesia. When he hears or thinks the words, they appear before him like closed captions in his head; this experience is called ticker-tape synesthesia. “I spend my days surrounded by thousands of written words, and sometimes it feels like there’s no escape,” he wrote. a magazine article this year. He recently discovered that most people don’t experience the world that way. Scientists have also only begun to study ticker-taping, but early research indicates that it may come from hyperconnectivity between speech and vision areas of the brain.
Longhand Advantage
Researchers know that we do we remember things better when we take notes by hand than when we write them on the computer. But why? Previous research suggested one reason: people who type quickly are transcribing the words spoken in a lecture or meeting, rather than taking the extra step and effort of summarizing in real time. This extra step is often necessary when writing by hand, and memory may help.
But writing things by hand can also be beneficial in itself, as it seems to connect more parts of the brain, researchers have now found. “When you’re writing, the same simple movement of your fingers is involved in producing every letter, whereas when you’re writing by hand, you immediately feel that the bodily sensation of producing an A is completely different from producing a B,” the study says. Co-author Audrey van der Meer of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
The year of brain rot
This was the year of brain rot, according to the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary, which Gen Z named Z slang the 2024 word of the year.
Brain rot, according to Oxford, is “the presumed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state” as a result of “excessive consumption” of trivial material on the Internet. Usage of the phrase increased by 230 percent since the previous year. Like other trending terms for online phenomena, it has become both a joke and a serious critique of the social media landscape where “slush content” is driven by “enshitetified” platforms.
But coins were also used more than 150 years ago to represent a similar evil. In 1854, Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden about his uneasiness with what he saw as an oversimplification of ideas. “While England endeavors to cure the potato rot,” wrote Thoreau, “will no effort be made to cure the brain rot, which is far more extensive and fatal?”
Linguistic rainbows
In the English language, the infinite colors of the rainbow are usually grouped into 11 basic color categories, such as green or orange. The Bolivian Tsimane language, on the other hand, has only three agreed-upon color categories: red, white and black. But bilingualism appears recreating the three colors of the rainbow of languagerecent studies have shown.
Tsimane’ and bilingual Spanish speakers are borrowing concepts of green, blue and other colors from Spanish. But it’s interesting, they don’t take the Spanish words themselves, for example blue for blue They are using less specific Tsimane’ color words—words that other Tsimane’ speakers use interchangeably with shades of green and blue—and are reducing their definitions to match Spanish. blue and the green. Lead study author Saima Malik-Moraleda of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says the study shows that learning another language “can transform your concepts in your native language.”
