Consumer & Gadgets

An AI tutor who teaches foreign language reading

The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) has developed a reading comprehension education AI technology that allows you to learn foreign language listening, speaking, and reading by talking to an artificial ...

Computer Sciences

Python-based compiler achieves orders-of-magnitude speedups

In 2018, The Economist published an in-depth piece on the programming language Python. "In the past 12 months," the article said, "Google users in America have searched for Python more often than for Kim Kardashian." Reality ...

Computer Sciences

A new and better way to create word lists

Word lists are the basis of so much research in so many fields. Researchers at the Complexity Science Hub have now developed an algorithm that can be applied to different languages and can expand word lists significantly ...

Machine learning & AI

AI- or human-written language? Assumptions mislead

Human assumptions regarding language usage can lead to flawed judgments of whether language was AI- or human-generated, Cornell Tech and Stanford researchers have found in a series of experiments.

Computer Sciences

Google gives progress report on its Universal Speech Model

In November, Google announced that it was embarking on an initiative that would culminate in the development of a machine-learning model capable of recognizing and translating 1,000 of the world's most spoken languages. Over ...

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Language

A language is a system for encoding information. In its most common use, the term refers to so-called "natural languages" — the forms of communication considered peculiar to humankind. In linguistics the term is extended to refer to the human cognitive facility of creating and using language. Essential to both meanings is the systematic creation and usage of systems of symbols—each referring to linguistic concepts with semantic or logical or otherwise expressive meanings.

The most obvious manifestations are spoken languages such as English or Spoken Chinese. However, there are also written languages and other systems of visual symbols such as sign languages.

Although some other animals make use of quite sophisticated communicative systems, and these are sometimes casually referred to as animal language, none of these are known to make use of all of the properties that linguists use to define language in the strict sense.

When discussed more technically as a general phenomenon then, "language" always implies a particular type of human thought which can be present even when communication is not the result, and this way of thinking is also sometimes treated as indistinguishable from language itself.

In Western Philosophy for example, language has long been closely associated with reason, which is also a uniquely human way of using symbols. In Ancient Greek philosophical terminology, the same word, logos, was used as a term for both language or speech and reason, and the philosopher Thomas Hobbes used the English word "speech" so that it similarly could refer to reason, as will be discussed below.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA