Large vocabulary continuous speech recognition is always a difficult task, and it is particularly so for low-resource languages. The scenario we focus on here is having only 1 hour of acoustic training data in the “target” language. This paper presents work on a data borrowing strategy combined with the recently proposed Subspace Gaussian Mixture Model (SGMM). We developed data borrowing strate...

Borrowing is often seen as a threat by speakers of minority or endangered languages (King 2008, Dubois and Melançons 1997) but linguists may be more likely to see it as a natural, and potentially revealing, resource of bilingual speakers. This paper uses the sociolinguistic construct of apparent time to explore borrowing in an endangered language further. If borrowing is an index of communal la...

As the lingua franca of the 21st century, English has become the main language for intercultural communication for those wanting to embrace globalization. In Portugal, it is the second language of most public and private domains influencing its culture and discourses. Language contact situations transform languages by the incorporations they make from other languages and Portugal has...

due to the close proximity of mazanadaran and russia there have always been considerable language contacts between the two regions. for example , in mazandarani dialect there have been numerous loanwords borrowed from russian language , while they are not in use in standard persian or its other dialects . this paper will examine these type of loanwords . they are occasionally imported with a di...

We propose substantive universals in the relationship between social evolution and language change. Social anthropologists have categorized societies into roughly four broad types by social organization: bands, tribes, chiefdoms and states. This classification is evolutionary in the sense that the society types arose in human history in the sequence given above. We compare these society types t...

By Bulgarian anatomical terms we mean the names established by scientific tradition, duplicating the Latin anatomical terms and coined with the means of the Bulgarian language or loan-words which are grammatically integrated (assimilated) into the Bulgarian anatomical text and are written in the Cyrillic alphabet. In their integrity and systemic relationships, the Bulgarian anatomical terms mak...