Oldest writing in the New World

A block with a hitherto unknown system of writing has been found in the Olmec heartland of Veracruz, Mexico. Stylistic and other dating of the block places it in the early first millennium before the common era, the oldest writing in the New World, with features that firmly assign this pivotal development to the Olmec civilization of Mesoamerica.     

三种动态脚本语言产生教学日历

快速准确地制作一张教学日历是高校每个学期都需要做的事情,本文分别用php,python,R三种流行的计算机动态脚本语言进行编程,制作出教学日历,从算法来看,用两个简单的嵌套循环就可以实现。由于语言特点不同,各语言具体实现各有特色,本文结合三种计算机语言的特点,分别进行算法优化,php结合html可以生成网页格式的日历,也可以写入指定的文件夹;python语言的pandas框架可以实现数据框的结构;r语言在数据框的基础上还有向量的概念可以利用。本文给出全部源代码,并进行了讲解,在对比分析的基础上,探讨各种语言的特色。     

Babbling in the manual mode: evidence for the ontogeny of language

Infant vocal babbling has been assumed to be a speech-based phenomenon that reflects the maturation of the articulatory apparatus responsible for spoken language production. Manual babbling has now been reported to occur in deaf children exposed to signed languages from birth. The similarities between manual and vocal babbling suggest that babbling is a product of an amodal, brain-based language capacity under maturational control, in which phonetic and syllabic units are produced by the infant as a first step toward building a mature linguistic system. Contrary to prevailing accounts of the neurological basis of babbling in language ontogeny, the speech modality is not critical in babbling. Rather, babbling is tied to the abstract linguistic structure of language and to an expressive capacity capable of processing different types of signals (signed or spoken).     

Language discrimination by human newborns and by cotton-top tamarin monkeys

Humans, but no other animal, make meaningful use of spoken language. What is unclear, however, is whether this capacity depends on a unique constellation of perceptual and neurobiological mechanisms or whether a subset of such mechanisms is shared with other organisms. To explore this problem, parallel experiments were conducted on human newborns and cotton-top tamarin monkeys to assess their ability to discriminate unfamiliar languages. A habituation-dishabituation procedure was used to show that human newborns and tamarins can discriminate sentences from Dutch and Japanese but not if the sentences are played backward. Moreover, the cues for discrimination are not present in backward speech. This suggests that the human newborns' tuning to certain properties of speech relies on general processes of the primate auditory system.     

The future of language

The world's language system is undergoing rapid change because of demographic trends, new technology, and international communication. These changes will affect both written and spoken communication. English may not be the dominant language of the future, and the need to be multilingual will be enhanced. Although many languages are going extinct, new ones are emerging in cities and extended social groups.     

语言变体与翻译——由《哈克贝恩·芬历险记》看语言变体的汉译

语言变体是相对与标准语言而言的,在每一种语言里的表现形式各不相同,英语的变 体可以通过语音、词汇、语法等手段来体现,而汉语则主要通过词汇来显示其差异。两者 之间的不平衡性给英语文学作品的汉译带来了很大的困难。本文旨在通过对《哈克贝恩.芬历险记》两种译本的比较来探讨英汉语言变体的翻译方法。     

Structural phylogenetics and the reconstruction of ancient language history

The contribution of language history to the study of the early dispersals of modern humans throughout the Old World has been limited by the shallow time depth (about 8000 +/- 2000 years) of current linguistic methods. Here it is shown that the application of biological cladistic methods, not to vocabulary (as has been previously tried) but to language structure (sound systems and grammar), may extend the time depths at which language data can be used. The method was tested against well-understood families of Oceanic Austronesian languages, then applied to the Papuan languages of Island Melanesia, a group of hitherto unrelatable isolates. Papuan languages show an archipelago-based phylogenetic signal that is consistent with the current geographical distribution of languages. The most plausible hypothesis to explain this result is the divergence of the Papuan languages from a common ancestral stock, as part of late Pleistocene dispersals.     

Coffee production and household dynamics. The popolucas of Ocotal Grande, Veracruz

Feminist anthropologists have evidenced the social and cultural aspects of motherhood and have challenged the universality of the nuclear family as the basis for residential and child-rearing practices. From a feminist anthropological perspective, the concept of the household has thus been redefined to capture the ways in which different principles of household recruitment and residence shape the activities and access to resources of women and men of different ages and status. This paper examines the relationship between household composition and coffee production in Ocotal Grande, a Popoluca community in the Sierra de Santa Marta in Southern Veracruz, Mexico. It shows that polygamous households are larger and have higher yields of coffee than other types of households. However, this does not mean that all members of the household profit equally from their contribution to coffee production. While some relationship exists between labor input and returns, the distribution of benefits is based on gender and age hierarchies and is open to conflict and dispute. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

中等职业学校学生外语口语交际能力培养初探

口语交际能力是现代公民的必备能力。在中等职业学校外语教学中培养学生的口语交际能力是教学的主要任务之一，本文着重探讨了外语教学中提高口语教学的方法。     

大学公共英语口语教学课型设计新概念

语言学习的目的是为了交际,而交际必须具备一定的口语能力。本文通过几种课堂英语课型设计方法的尝试,来训练提高学生的英语表达能力,以期达到有效的交际目的。     

语块与口语输出

语块也叫词块,是一种结构完整,能表达一定意义的语言形式。语块作为一个相对完整的语言整体,熟悉它可增加口语输出的流利性和准确性。对语块的辩认、掌握是口语输出的关键。     

论国际共同语的现在和未来发展趋势

文章主要从国际共同语的现在和未来发展趋势,论述了英语在当今世界作为国际共同语存在的历史原因及其发展前景,论述了汉语在语音、用字量、语言应用、编吗用字速度以及外国人学习汉语等方面均优越于欧洲及其他各国文字;并根据当今世界共同语的应用与发展,科学地探讨了二十一世纪汉语将成为世界通用语言。     

浅谈对大学生英语口语交际能力的培养

随着大学外语教学改革的不断深入，提高大学生的英语听说能力，尤其是提高英语口语交际能力已经刻不容缓。本文结合我们学院的实际教学情况，着重阐述了培养大学生英语口语交际能力的途径和方法。     

Phonemic diversity supports a serial founder effect model of language expansion from Africa

Human genetic and phenotypic diversity declines with distance from Africa, as predicted by a serial founder effect in which successive population bottlenecks during range expansion progressively reduce diversity, underpinning support for an African origin of modern humans. Recent work suggests that a similar founder effect may operate on human culture and language. Here I show that the number of phonemes used in a global sample of 504 languages is also clinal and fits a serial founder-effect model of expansion from an inferred origin in Africa. This result, which is not explained by more recent demographic history, local language diversity, or statistical non-independence within language families, points to parallel mechanisms shaping genetic and linguistic diversity and supports an African origin of modern human languages.     

Olmec civilization, veracruz, Mexico: dating of the san lorenzo phase

Archeological excavations at San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan, Veracruz, show that the Olmec sculptures of this zone are associated with the San Lorenzo phase, which can be placed in the Early Formative period (1500-800 B.C.) on the basis of ceramic comparisons. Five of six radiocarbon dates for the San Lorenzo phase fall within the 1200-900 B.C. span. The San Lorenzo phase therefore marks the beginning of Olmec civilization, and the sites forming the San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan group represent the oldest civilized communities known in Mexico or Central America.     

外语学习与母语学习不同方式分析

外语学习不同于母语学习，它有自己的学习规律，但又受母语学习的影响和支配，从二的差异角度进行分析，以提高外语学习的效果。     

Languages evolve in punctuational bursts

Linguists speculate that human languages often evolve in rapid or punctuational bursts, sometimes associated with their emergence from other languages, but this phenomenon has never been demonstrated. We used vocabulary data from three of the world's major language groups-Bantu, Indo-European, and Austronesian-to show that 10 to 33% of the overall vocabulary differences among these languages arose from rapid bursts of change associated with language-splitting events. Our findings identify a general tendency for increased rates of linguistic evolution in fledgling languages, perhaps arising from a linguistic founder effect or a desire to establish a distinct social identity.     

英语歧义浅谈

任何语言都有歧义现象的存在，英语也不例外。英语歧义现象是由多种原因引起的，一方 面，英语歧义句语义含混，模棱两可，会妨碍人们正常的信息交流，另一方面，正确的理解和恰当的运用英语歧义，不但能提高英语的欣赏水平，而且可以使我们的语言更加生动有趣，富有幽默感     

Visual language discrimination in infancy

This study shows that 4- and 6-month-old infants can discriminate languages (English from French) just from viewing silently presented articulations. By the age of 8 months, only bilingual (French-English) infants succeed at this task. These findings reveal a surprisingly early preparedness for visual language discrimination and highlight infants' selectivity for retaining only necessary perceptual sensitivities.     

复合型外语人才培养模式的探索--谈非外语专业与外语专业交叉培养模式

在世界经济全球化的今日,社会对外语人才的需要呈多元化的趋,这对外语人才培养格局提出了紧迫的要求.复合型外语人才培养模式以专业为基础,使外语作为技能、工具与专业相结合,提高学生的英语应用能力和文化素养,这类复合型人才具有广泛的社会适应性,并将带来巨大的人才效应.