Sociolinguo

But with the help of machine learning – a form of artificial intelligence – researchers were able to unravel the code. They discovered the text was filled with thousands of bizarre treatments such as drinking several glasses of high-quality red wine or fermenting a nutmeg in some dough to combat dysentery. (You can see the full coded document online at the Vatican Library, shelfmark Borg.lat.898)."

However, some experts take a more skeptical view of the role HAQERs might have played in Neanderthals and early humans. Though today the genetic sequences appear to be associated with language ability, they may have initially developed for some other reason."

"Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots are increasingly used for self-triage and medical advice seeking. Accurate AI performance, however, hinges on how users interact with such consumer-facing applications. While previous research has identified reservations regarding AI-generated medical advice, earlier stages of human–AI interaction, such as how symptoms are communicated, remain largely unexplored. In a preregistered between-subject experiment (n = 500), participants were randomly assigned to provide simulated symptom reports for common medical conditions to either an AI chatbot or a human physician. We evaluated the quality of the reports for an initial medical urgency assessment using physician-validated large language model-based suitability metrics. Participants who believed they were interacting with an AI tool (versus a physician) provided lower-quality symptom reports for medical triage. Our findings indicate a bias in how users communicate symptoms in digital settings. This outcome could compromise the performance of consumer-facing AI tools in real-world applications, regardless of the underlying model’s actual capacity."

Created by Pete Sands, Navajo Highways introduces young audiences to Navajo culture and language through storytelling, puppetry, and vibrant characters. The series follows Sadie, a young girl from an urban background, as she reconnects with her family and heritage in the fictional community of Mitten Creek. Along the way, Sadie learns traditional values, Diné Bizaad (Navajo language), and cultural teachings from her relatives and a host of Indigenous guest stars."

"It is fascinating to find that the name of Mexico’s most beloved religious figure, La Virgen de Guadalupe, has neither a Spanish nor an Indigenous origin, but an Arabic one. The devotion to our Lady of Guadalupe was brought by Hernán Cortés himself. Although the Arab occupation of Spain had ended by the time he left for the Americas, it left deep remnants in his home region of Extremadura."

"To be clear, this is the third discovered copy of the poem Hymn by Caedmon the cowherd. The manuscript was included in the Ecclesiastical History of the English People by Bede, a northern English monk, and dates between the years 800 and 830. Although the two previously found copies are slightly older, these were mostly written in Latin with some Old English in the margins or at the end. By contrast, the newest discovery has the poem’s main body text in Old English, demonstrating a growing interest in the language at the time, according to a recent study on the findings, published in Early Medieval England and its Neighbours."

"These data consist of newly OCRed and annotated narratives, both autobiographical texts written by, and interviews with, formerly enslaved persons of African descent in the United States of America and the Caribbean, including extensive time-related and geographical metadata. The texts authored by these individuals span from the years 1795 to approximately 1900, while the interviews were conducted in the 1930s. The former are written in standardised English from that time, whereas the latter often are written down in mediated, vernacular form, causing issues in lemmatisation and part-of-speech tagging. The aim is to create openly accessible corpora that can be utilised for the purpose of researching how these formerly enslaved persons described their own lives."

"Which brings me back to my mother’s tongue. I no longer see my mother’s invented word, “tengerous,” as a mistake. It is a creative solution, a neologism. Having more than one language in your head, on your lips and at your fingertips makes you flexible, sharpens your ear and lengthens your reach. Until one day, you may even touch your nose."

""12" isn’t the only slang term for police, but it is one of the more unusual ones, largely because of how unclear its backstory remains. Most other nicknames for officers can be loosely tied to cultural moments, changes in language, or specific historical contexts."

"Last year, writer Miguel Rodríguez Monteavaro brought contemporary Asturian writers to new readerships with his bilingual anthology Para alêm dos glaciares e do cemitério de sóis, presenting work by twenty-two Asturian poets translated into Portuguese by Jorge Melícias.  And writers of every generation recently came together to found an Asturian chapter of PEN International, which we hope to see up and running in the near future."

"The terminology of the US-Israel war on Iran is drawn from a range of linguistic origins. From “Epic Fury” to “Kafir” and “Hormuz”, there are stories behind what these words mean and where they come from. Al Jazeera’s Alma Milisic and Basel Ghazoghli break down some of the terms."

Whether applied to Asian Americans or to literary translators, transparency is framed as an inherent quality, an immutable aspect of a person’s identity—but in Yau Ching’s poem, transparency is a process, a way of being in the here and now over and against the vastness of the world. The poem from which these words are drawn is called “Spacetime” 時空, and one of its opening lines reads: “The English word longing has length in it.” Yau Ching puns on the long vowel in the Cantonese word 長, mirrored in my translation by the long vowel in the word “longing.” This is one of the poems that, to my mind, demonstrate the self-translating quality of Yau Ching’s work, its easy fluency with both of Hong Kong’s official languages."