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Blobrana


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  Nepal's mystery language on the verge of extinction

Gyani Maiya Sen, a 75-year-old woman from western Nepal, can perhaps be forgiven for feeling that the weight of the world rests on her shoulders.
She is the only person still alive in Nepal who fluently speaks the Kusunda language. The unknown origins and mysterious sentence structures of Kusunda have long baffled linguists.
As such, she has become a star attraction for campaigners eager to preserve her dying tongue.
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Blobrana


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Language universality idea tested with biology method

A long-standing idea that human languages share universal features that are dictated by human brain structure has been cast into doubt.
A study reported in Nature has borrowed methods from evolutionary biology to trace the development of grammar in several language families.
The results suggest that features shared across language families evolved independently in each lineage.
The authors say cultural evolution, not the brain, drives language development.
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Blobrana


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First multilingual dictionary based on universal words
Researchers at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrids School of Computing have developed an original system for building multilingual dictionaries based on multiple term equivalences from what are known as universal words. System reliability and accuracy is 88%.
The system is based on Princeton Universitys WordNet database. WordNet is a lexical database developed by linguists at Princetons Cognitive Science Laboratory. The database was designed to inventory, classify and relate the semantic and lexical content of the English language. WordNet is packaged as an electronic database that can be downloaded over the Internet.
WordNets underlying foundation is synset (synonym set), a group of interchangeable words that denote a meaning or particular usage. Each synset is one possible meaning of a word, described briefly and concisely. WordNet has a lexicon of over 200,000 perfectly structured and defined English terms. This is one of the pillars of the system conceived by researchers at the UPMs School of Computing.
The systems other mainstay are universal words. The concept of universal word came out of the UNL (Universal Networking Language) Project. The aim of this project is to eliminate the barriers of linguistic diversity by creating a medium of information exchange through which users can communicate in their own language

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