October Newsletter

Speech to Speech translation

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, recently announced that they developed an AI translation engine that can translate from an unwritten language.  So far AI translations depended on the availability of a vast amount of text material for the language that needed to be translated. With speech-to-speech translation that constraint has been overcome. Meta demonstrated this translation with Holkien, a southern Chinese language spoken by 46 million people.  These results provide hope to translate 3000+ other languages in the world that do not have a script either!

LJL in partnership with CooLingo

Linguistics Justice League is excited to partner with CooLingo! CooLingo app was developed by Abdul Rahman Hamadeh, Moayed Haji Ali, and Sarieh Srda under the guidance from Prof. Aykut Erdem and Prof. Gözde Gül Şahin.

CooLingo, voice-enabled chatbot that aims to make language learning more fun and engaging by simulating real-life conversations. While engaging with the user in a conversation, CooLingo can track the user’s language errors, provide personalized feedback and adjust the difficulty level to ensure that the user is always challenged but not overwhelmed. They do this by using state-of-the-art artificial intelligence models.

CooLingo

EDULANG UPDATES​

We made a lot of exciting progress on EduLang this month! EduLang’s UI has been revamped and we are looking forward to improving and adding new features to EduLang in the coming month. Keep an eye out for EduLang’s latest update in the google play store, coming out in the next week or so!

Linguistics Justice League Challenge

Linguistics Justice League partnered with creAItivity to host an event to gather ideas that help bridge the gap between low and high-resource languages through Artificial Intelligence!

We hosted an event on 🌟 October 29th 🌟 where teams learned about NLP (Natural Language Processing), APIs, and came up with project proposals to help low-resource communities learn English! 

Special thanks to our sponsors: Taskade, Interview Cake and Balsamiq

New Team members

Linguistics Justice League's family is growing!We are so proud to say that LJL volunteers come from different backgrounds with diverse skillset. Please join us in welcoming our rockstar team members who believe in LJL's mission and are committed to dedicating their valuable time volunteering with LJL

Jovani

UX/UI designer

Courtney Recio

UX/UI designer

Harshitha Ramnath

UX/UI Designer

Denis

Front end Developer

Evolution of human language

By Lealam Birhanu

Language is the outcome of human beings’ evolution and its increasing need to exchange information. Through our body language and then via drawings on the walls of caves, communication had always been the core of society, its development tool. Our ancestors needed more than drawings, so they invented language, the spur to where we are now. They agreed upon what to call this and how to say that. They developed their minds, got their tongue around, and found speaking. Thousands of years passed to finally learn that the languages in use were prisoners of time and place. In order to prevent these limitations and transfer history, culture, and tradition to generations, written languages got constructed. As much as the beginning of language is interesting, the development of spoken languages to written ones is also fascinating to look at.

It is hard to claim exactly when writing started, but many scholars agree that the first well-constructed writing system sparked in the 40th century B.C. Sumerian is believed to be the oldest written language. Many languages were introduced to their written form after that, of which more than 4000 languages are still in existence. And to reach where it is now, writing had its foot on different major steps through the centuries. These key stages are:
Drawing-based writing system – Though not considered a proper writing system, it was the first to exist. Different researchers use ancient drawings as a reference in their studies.
Sound-based writing system – was developed after realizing that writing a word by dividing it into the individual sounds we make was possible. Ethiopian semantic languages are good examples. Amharic, for instance, has alphabets for all of the sounds that founded the language: words will be the combination of those. The symbol ‘ሊ’ represents the sound ‘Li’, and ‘ላ’ stands for ‘La’.
Words-based writing system – was the first system that showed a direct relationship between spoken and written languages; one sign in the system would represent one word. A good example can be the Arabic number system. For example, '2’ stands for ‘Two’. Languages with this writing system have thousands of symbols representing every word which makes it harder to learn and use them: a better way was necessary.
Alphabetic writing system – The latest and most known writing system is the alphabetic one. The number of symbols used in this system is far less than the previous ones, making it easier to utilize. English and Latin languages belong to this category.

 In general, the immense interest of humans to assure their existence even in another era and put things in writing led to its current development. Finally, it is worth noting that any writing system can serve any language after stipulating some necessary changes. This shows that no natural relation exists between written and spoken language.

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