After she graduates from Furman, Alicia Key \u201921 hopes to either program video games or develop an app that helps users learn a foreign language.<\/p>\n
If she chooses the latter, a research project she did over the summer with Assistant Professor of Asian Studies Alexander Francis-Ratte and Assistant Professor of Computer Science Christopher Alvin will help.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe theory is that Japanese and Korean are sister languages, and we were trying to prove whether an ancestor language between the two exists,\u201d said Key.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe examined the readings to analyze the proposed cognates and then, based on those proposed cognates and sound correspondences, we tried our hand at finding our own cognates by reconstructing Korean and Japanese words.\u201d<\/p>\n
For the second half of the project, Key wrote a computer program designed to verify proposed cognates to sound correspondences.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou need to justify the relations,\u201d said Key, a computer science major and linguistics minor. \u201cThis program helps with that accountability.\u201d<\/p>\n
Key said her java skills improved during the project.<\/p>\n
\u201cTrying to find archeological evidence that Japanese and Korean descended from the same ancestor language is tedious,\u201d Key said. \u201cI thought there had to be a better way to do this. It\u2019s a work in progress.\u201d<\/p>\n
While the research is far from finished, she learned something valuable \u2013 \u201cComputers can help the humanities.\u201d<\/p>\n