komunikacja: Languages of science

Evidence: 100 • authority: 72

Languages of science are vehicular languages used by one or several scientific communities for international communication. According to the science historian Michael Gordin, scientific languages are "either specific forms of a given language that are used in conducting science, or they are the set of distinct languages in which science is done." These two meanings are different, since the first describes a distinct prose in a given language (i.e., scientific writing), while the second describes which languages are used in mainstream science. Until the 19th century, classical languages—such as Latin, Classical Arabic, Sanskrit, Classical Malay and Classical Chinese—were commonly used across…

Evidence: 43 • authority: 88

When do languages use the same word for different meanings? The Goldilocks Principle in colexification. Lexical ambiguity is pervasive in language, and often systematic. For instance, the Spanish word "dedo" refers to both a toe and a finger, and this TOE-FINGER ambiguity is found in over 100 languages. Previous work shows that systematic ambiguities involve related meanings. This is attributed to cognitive pressure towards simplicity in language, as it makes lexicons easier to learn and use. The present study examines the interplay between this pressure and the competing pressure for languages to support accurate information transfer. We hypothesize that ambiguity follows a Goldilocks prin…

Evidence: 43 • authority: 72

A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term family is a metaphor borrowed from biology, with the tree model used in historical linguistics analogous to a family tree, or to phylogenetic trees of taxa used in evolutionary taxonomy. Linguists thus describe the daughter languages within a language family as being genetically related. The divergence of a proto-language into daughter languages typically occurs through geographical separation, with different regional dialects of the proto-language undergoing different language changes and thus becoming distinct languages over time. One well-known exam…

Evidence: 43 • authority: 72

Hebrew is a Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and remained in regular use as a first language until after 200 CE and as the liturgical language of Judaism (since the Second Temple period) and Samaritanism. The language was revived as a spoken language in the 19th century, and is the only successful large-scale example of linguistic revival. It is the only Canaanite language still spoken today. It is also one of the only two Northwest Semitic languages with contemporary speakers, the other being Aramaic. The earliest examples of written Paleo-Hebrew date to the 10th centur…

Evidence: — • authority: 88

Letter detection for homographs with different meanings in different language texts. Tests of inter-lingual homographs that have different meanings across two languages support models postulating initial non-selective access to competing language representations, e.g. Bilingual Interactive Activation (BIA) model. Most such research assessed inter-lingual homographs in the absence of connected text. Here a letter detection paradigm was used that required subjects to detect letters in words in connected text. Prior work with this paradigm suggested that readers respond to only one interpretation of an intra-lingual homograph when detecting letters. Three experiments described here indicate th…

Evidence: — • authority: 88

Interpretation vs Implication vs Meaning vs Narrative: (Decomposition of Escalation Positions in Language Governance). This paper does attempt to distinguish implication, interpretation, meaning, and narrative as separate descriptive positions within an escalation sequence. The analysis remains descriptive and posture-structural. It does not convert description into instruction, evaluation, explanation, or application. Experience Boundary This paper concerns appearances of language escalation within GIFU where wording, reading, significance, and sequencing become perceptible as distinct operations. It does not claim to represent all interpretive systems, all linguistic traditions, or all fo…