news 2022

A global database helps explore the complex history of our genes and languages Does the history of our languages match the history of our genes? Charles Darwin thought yes, others said no. An interdisciplinary team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, the University of Zurich and Harvard University has put together GeLaTo, a global database linking linguistic and genetic data.

Cultura Researchers Adelina Millet and Lluís Feliu, members of the Institute of Ancient Near East Studies (IPOA) of the University of Barcelona, have published a new edition of the Epic of Gilgamesh , the oldest literary epic and a classic in universal literature. Recent archaeological findings led to an update of the Epic, of which a first edition was published in Catalan in 2007.

Cultura The manuscript is the collection of poems Pisando la dudosa luz del día , which Camilo José Cela wrote from November 1 to 11, 1936, driven by the death of his girlfriend in tragic circumstances, victim of the bombings of the first major siege of Franco's troops in Madrid, to which he would later enlist.

Researchers have demonstrated how Apple's use of a widely adopted data protection model could expose individuals to privacy attacks. By investigating Apple's use of the model, called local differential privacy (LDP), the researchers found that individuals' preferred emoji skin tone and political leanings could be inferred from the company's data.

Scientists have produced a series of maps showing historical migration events, including the migration of mountain farmers native to Upper Valais who began to settle in German-speaking Switzerland in the 13th century, by applying methods from population genetics - but using linguistic data rather than genes.

Linguists and computer scientists collaborate to publish a large global Open Access lexical database Scholars from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and the University of Auckland in New Zealand have created a new global repository of linguistic data. The project is designed to facilitate new insights into the evolution of words and sounds of the languages spoken across the world today.

Current calls for blood donations highlight the urgent need for blood. A new study at Universität Hamburg shows that the willingness to donate blood has dramatically decreased throughout the pandemic. The findings were published in the journal PLOS ONE. Even before the corona pandemic, there were repeated blood drives to meet urgent needs.

Changes of speech sounds during the Middle Ages shed light on how we process language Our language is changing constantly. Researchers of the University of Vienna found that, over centuries, frequently occurring speech sound patterns get even more frequent. The reason for this development is that our brain can perceive, process and learn frequent, and thus prototypical sound patterns more easily than less frequent ones.

Not being able to recognise a well-known melody without the lyrics, not hearing whether someone is singing out of tune and not being able to produce a rhythm; for some people musicality is not their strongest point. For a small section of the population, this inability goes very far: they suffer from the disorder congenital amusia.

Students who study Virgil's Aeneid at school find it significantly more engaging than other 'high-prestige' literature, even though they only learn tiny fragments of the text, research suggests. Ultimately, if this is high-level poetry that students actually like, perhaps we ought to be finding ways to give them the chance to do it Frances Foster The finding comes from a limited study with three groups of 15 and 16-year-old state school students taking Latin GCSE, and raises the possibility that there may be a case for expanding ancient literature's use in the wider curriculum.

In languages spoken around the world, words describing rough surfaces are highly likely to feature a 'trilled /r/' sound - a linguistic pattern that stretches back over 6,000 years, a new study reveals. Language scientists first analysed words for 'rough' and 'smooth' in a worldwide sample of 332 spoken languages - discovering a strong link between the sounds of speech and the sense of touch, which has influenced the structure of modern languages.