As a result, linguists often disagree about which tongues belong to a particular family.
Once the preserve of gifted linguists, code breaking was soon invaded by mathematicians and scientists.
According to linguists, the world's tongues are divided into about 250 groups, known as stocks.
We don't have enough linguists to deal with this tremendous flow of information we're getting.
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This would please linguists who fear that the spread of English imperils the survival of other languages.
Linguists estimate about 200 Native American languages are spoken in the U.S. and Canada, with another 100 already extinct.
Lexicon employs two in-house linguists and consults with seventy-seven others around the world.
Not surprisingly, Prof Chen's findings have been criticised by both economists and linguists.
Perhaps, but even here a backlash is starting, led by linguists with close ties to European institutions and governments.
This admission is no surprise to linguists, who see myriad stumbling blocks on the road to a computerized universal translator.
The atlas is designed to highlight awareness of languages in danger around the world and was compiled by 30 linguists.
Instead, as linguists probed deeper into the world's languages (7, 000 or so, only a fraction of them analyzed), innumerable unpredictable differences emerged.
Then H5 lawyers, engineers and linguists draw up patterns of words that might be used to express various elements of the scheme.
The group's members include linguists, lexicographers and etymologists, grammarians, professors and amateurs.
But as linguists pumped translation rules into databases, computers struggled, repeatedly stumbling over the quirks of individual tongues to produced mangled sentences.
Linguists are chronicling how nomadic communication changes language itself, and thus thought.
Each must be programmed in as many as a dozen different languages, with voices and scripts produced by linguists around the world.
Facebook also employs linguists that are constantly checking what users are searching for, and making sure Graph Search can account for those results.
He found a newsgroup that was populated by amateur linguists from all over the world, who were excitedly conversing about new ways of conversing.
There are few people to handle difficult cross-regional topics such as water resources or climate change, and few linguists fluent in tongues helpful beyond Asia.
According to Halle, he was assigned to Building 20 because that was the least valuable real estate on campus, and nobody thought much of linguists.
It was their study of the origins of the written word that provided linguists with their surest view of the way that language has evolved.
Linguists and educators alike are raising their hands and talking about the enormity of the digital translation challenge as well as the implications of solving it.
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Some linguists, though, instead classify them as separate languages within a language family, analogous to the French, Spanish and Italian languages within the Romance language family.
As it turns out, the patent-pending analytical algorithms used in their system are based on decades of prior work by linguists, forensic scientists, anthropologists and intelligence agencies.
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Sociologists, psychologists, rhetoricians, linguists, and historians of science have all noted the importance of language, metaphor, and definition to our very understanding of the world around us.
And many linguists believe it is hard to say anything definitive about languages prior to 8, 000 years ago, as their relationships would have become jumbled over the millennia.
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Recent research has shown that the language family tree as reconstructed by linguists overlaps remarkably well with the one independently drawn for the corresponding people by molecular biologists.
Unlike biologists, linguists do not have fossils to guide them through the past (apart from a few thousand years of records from the few tongues spoken by literate societies).
The valleys of the Caucasus used to be a paradise for linguists in search of unusual syntax, but Ubykh, one of the region's baffling tongues, officially expired in 1992.
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