Language ‘mutations’ affect least-used words

Linguistics

12:24 11 October 2007 by Bob Holmes

As languages evolve over centuries and millennia, the most frequently used words tend to remain unaltered, while rarer words are more likely to change.

This tendency was long suspected, but has now been proven rigorously for the first time by two new studies. The results show that the tools of evolutionary biology can be applied to study the evolution of cultural artefacts like language.

Evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel and his colleagues at the University of Reading, UK, used a comparative database of Indo-European languages to trace the words used to express 200 different meanings in 87 different languages.

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eye spy

Τελεστές για μηχανές αναζήτησης

Googleology, News, Research

 

Εδώ και αρκετό καιρό ήθελα να γράψω κάτι παραπάνω για τις μεθόδους αναζήτησης στο Google g (άντε και στο Bing μια και πολλοί μού έχετε πει ότι τώρα πια με το θάνατο της Altavista προτιμάτε το Bing). Όμως για πολλούς και διάφορους λόγους ποτέ δεν κατάφερνα να το ξεκινήσω. Τώρα λοιπόν, βρήκα το χρόνο και σας παρουσιάζω ενημερωμένες τις μεθόδους έρευνας σε μηχανές αναζήτησης. Αυτό είναι το πρώτο μέρος μια και στο δεύτερο θα καλύψω τους υπόλοιπους τελεστές.

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Google’s Tally Of World’s Book Titles: 129,864,880 – NPR August 12, 2010

Googleology

Google’s Tally Of World’s Book Titles: 129,864,880

August 12, 2010

 

 
How many different books are there in the world? It’s a question Jon Orwant often hears. He’s an engineering manager at Google Books — part of the tech company’s efforts to digitize all of the world’s books. Recently, they announced an answer: 129,864,880. Melissa Block talks to Orwant about how Google came up with the number.

Copyright © 2010 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

 

MELISSA BLOCK, host: You may not have devoted your waking hours to wondering exactly how many books have been published, but Google has. In fact, they’re trying to count as part of a mission to index and digitize all of them.

So far, Google says, our planet has produced 129,864,880 books – at least that was the number as of last week. Jon Orwant is engineering manager at Google Books. So Jon, that was the number last week. What about now?

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