Ha! Photo by Getty Images By Dr. Thomas Hills (left) and Tomas Engelthaler (right) / 11.20.2017 Hills: Professor of Psychology Engelthaler: PhD Candidate in Psychology University of Warwick ‘Which word is funnier: porridge or oatmeal?’ This is the question one of us recently posed to the other. Clearly, the notion was insane. Surely finding something funny requires context[…]
This khipu, which was made before the Spanish conquest of the Incas, was probably used for accounting, as indicated by the knots in the cords. / Brendan Smialowski, Getty Images Andean cultures developed a mysterious form of writing that has never been deciphered. Scientists are teaming with locals to solve the enigma. By Dr. Sabine Hyland[…]
Jamie Thomas, AB ’06, studies zombies, language, race and othering at Swarthmore College. Photo by Jennifer Weisbord By Alana Hauser / 10.16.2017 In 2003, bestselling author Max Brooks published the Gray’s Anatomy of survival guides. The Zombie Survival Guide took readers on a journey through the anatomy of the living dead: their physical attributes, behavioral patterns and historical origins.[…]
‘You can never, in American public life, underestimate the advantages of complete and total incomprehensibility.’ Kissinger meets Anwar Sadat in 1976. / Wikimedia Commons By Dr. Edward Gibson / 09.25.2017 Professor of Cognitive Science Massachusetts Institute of Technology About 20 per cent of the United States population (60 million out of 300 million people) are[…]
Everyone sees them all, but we don’t all give them the same distinct names. lazyllama/Shutterstock.com By Dr. Ted Gibson and Dr. Bevil R. Conway / 09.18.2017 Gibson: Professor of Cognitive Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Conway: Investigator at the National Eye Institute’s Sensation, Cognition, Action Unit, National Institutes of Health People with standard vision can see[…]
By Dr. Anne Reboul / 06.01.2017 Senior Researcher Institute for Cognitive Sciences-Marc Jeannerod It’s the late afternoon and you are in the kitchen, idly beginning to think about dinner, at the end of a long day at work. Suddenly the peace is shattered by the noisy entrance of your dog and your son. Your dog[…]
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda in 1905 / Wikimedia Commons By Dr. Lewis Glinert / 09.06.2017 Professor of Hebrew Studies and Linguistics Dartmouth College In a Jewish section of Jerusalem, in 1885, a young couple, Eliezer and Devora Ben-Yehuda, were fearful for their child: they were rearing him in Hebrew, an unheard-of idea. They had taken in a[…]
The small city of Hazard, Kentucky, rests in the heart of Appalachia. AP Photo/David Stephenson By Dr. Kirk Hazen / 07.13.2017 Professor of Linguistics West Virginia University During the 2016 presidential election, broad support for Donald Trump came from most communities in Appalachia, where he received 63 percent of the vote. A great deal of national attention was[…]
People currently speak 7,000 languages around the globe. Michael Gavin By Dr. Michael Gavin / 07.16.2017 Associate Professor of Human Dimensions of Natural Resources Colorado State University The thatched roof held back the sun’s rays, but it could not keep the tropical heat at bay. As everyone at the research workshop headed outside for a break,[…]
Spock / Photo by Rex By Simson L. Garfinkel / 02.20.2017 My understanding of the word interesting came not from school but from a 14-inch black-and-white television showing Star Trek reruns in the late 1970s. ‘Fascinating is a word I use for the unexpected,’ I heard Mr Spock explain. ‘In this case, I should think interesting[…]
French Menu / Photo by Chris Cameron, Flickr, Creative Commons By Dr. Angela Grant / 10.28.2016 Horizon Postdoctoral Fellow Concordia University Remember the last time you took a language course? No matter if it was online or classroom-based, immersive or translation-focused, I’d bet a large sum that your language abilities when you left that course[…]
Image by futureatlas/Flickr By Dr. Angela Grant / 03.14.2017 Cognitive Psychology and Neuroscience Research Over the past few years, you might have noticed a surfeit of articles covering current research on bilingualism. Some of them suggest that it sharpens the mind, while others are clearly intended to provoke more doubt than confidence, such as Maria Konnikova’s[…]
Salisbury House Library and Rare Documents Collection, Des Moines, IA By Dr. Charlie Huenemann / 05.30.2017 Professor of Philosophy Utah State University Poets, historians, scientists, philosophers – we all seek to capture the world in a net of language. Yet it is the nature of nets to capture some things while letting others slip away.[…]
Image from ACME Squares, Creative Commons By Dr. Carlos Gray Santana Assistant Professor of Philosophy University of Utah Abstract Linguists (and philosophers of language) have long disagreed about the ontology of language, and thus about the proper subject matter of their disciplines. A close examination of the leading arguments in the debates shows that while[…]
A Pirahã family. / Photo by Caleb Everett By Dr. Caleb Everett / 04.25.2017 Andrew Carnegie Fellow Professor of Anthropology University of Miami Numbers do not exist in all cultures. There are numberless hunter-gatherers embedded deep in Amazonia, living along branches of the world’s largest river tree. Instead of using words for precise quantities, these[…]
Figure 1: P.Cairo 30961 recto. Photograph Ahmed Amin, Egyptian Museum, Cairo. By Dr. Stephen Kidd / 12.18.2013 Robert Gale Noyes Assistant Professor of Classics Brown University Introduction In a 3rd-century bce Greco-Egyptian letter inscribed on papyrus, a man writes to his friend about a recent dream. He is writing in Greek, but in order to[…]
By Dr. Gregory Nagy / 03.13.2015 Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature Professor of Comparative Literature Director of the Center for Hellenic Studies Harvard University Classical Inquiries Center for Hellenic Studies Helen and Menelaus on a vase / Louvre Museum, Paris When I say etymology here, I mean the procedure of reconstructing a form[…]
Language families of the world (click image to enlarge) By Dr. Paul Heggarty / 03.24.2015 Department of Linguistics and Cultural Evolution Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History Abstract This is not about the histories of languages themselves. Rather, it explores what those histories can tell us of the populations and societies that[…]
Karian rock tombs, near Marmaris, Turkey / Wikimedia Commons By Dr. Naomi Carless Unwin / 11.01.2016 Senior Fellow, Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations Koç University, Istanbul CHS Research Bulletin 4:2 (2016) Introduction The history of Karia is entangled with that of the Greek-speaking world; the cultural and religious character of the region was shaped by[…]
Veda Performance at TACO Diwali, 2016 / YouTube Screen Capture By Dr. Christian Lee Novetzke / 10.01.2015 Professor of South Asia, Comparative Religion, and International Studies University of Washington In modern scholarship on non-modern, and especially non-Western, subjects, we tend to treat the dialectic between orality and literacy as if all theoretical and historical questions[…]
Jain monks in Gujarat, India By Dr. John E. Cort / 10.01.2015 Professor of Asian and Comparative Religions Denison University From Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature, and Performance in North India[1] Language and Translation The 17th century Digambar Jain temple and the 18th century Gauri Shankar Hindu temple in Delhi / 123RF.com In one sense,[…]
02.27.2017 86-year-old Riccardo Bertani is an exceptional man. Born to a family of farmers in Caprara, a small settlement in Reggio Emilia, Italy, he abandoned his study right after elementary school and dedicated his life to translating and documenting over 100 extinct and rare languages from all around the world. “It was castrating, I quit,”[…]
Judeo-Spanish: A Dying Language By Dr. Haïm Vidal Séphiha / 1997 Professor Emeritus of Linguistics Université Paris Sorbonne Nouvelle European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages Institut Sépharade Européen Origins On 31 March 1492, the Spain of three religions (Christianity, Islam and Judaism) followed the example of other European nations. After the fall of Grenada, which[…]
Roman city gate of the CCAA, imaginatively inscribed with “CCAA”. / Römisch-Germanisches Museum, Cologne. – Photo: PK, 2014 By Dr. Peter Kruschwitz / 05.08.2014 From The Petrified Muse Professor of Classics Fellow of the Pontifical Academy for Latin (Pontificia Academia Latinitatis) University of Reading My son’s interest in the Latin language, fuelled by his engaging[…]
The creators of the Corded Ware culture, named after this intricate pottery, may have spoken an Indo-European language derived from one spoken by herders from the East. By Dr. Mark Damen / 07.25.2015 Professor of Ancient Drama, Ancient History, Latin and Greek Language Utah State University Introduction: The Archaeology of Language The discovery of the[…]
Language dynamics / Creative Commons By Dr. James S. Wrench / 11.30.2014 Professor of Communication and Media State University of New York, New Paltz Language Matters © Thinkstock Ask any professional speaker or speech writer, and they will tell you that language matters. In fact, some of the most important and memorable lines in American[…]
Over a third of new conservation science documents published annually are in non-English languages, despite assumption of English as scientific ‘lingua franca’. Researchers find examples of important science missed at international level, and practitioners struggling to access new knowledge, as a result of language barriers. 12.29.2016 English is now considered the common language, or ‘lingua[…]
Ancient Sanskrit carving on a golden background By Dr. Thomas R. Trautmann Professor Emeritus of Anthropology University of Michigan Volume 1, 2011 Abstract The theory-deadness of antiquity under the ideology of modernism, the theory-deadness of Asia under Eurocentrism, and the theory-deadness of the precolonial under post-colonial theory converge to hide the aliveness of ancient Indian[…]
12.22.2016 It’s not unusual for youth nowadays to speak more than one language, but 32-year-old Muhamed Mešić is not your typical polyglot. He can communicate fluently in 56 different languages and claims to understand over 70 of them. Ever since he was a little boy growing up in Tuzla, an industrial city in the former Yugoslavia (currently[…]
L.L. Zamenhof By Dr. Romeo Vitelli / 09.30.2016 Psychologist Providentia It was a noble idea. Who knew that such tragedy would spring from it? When L._L._Zamenhof developed the artificial language known as Esperanto, he intended it as a method of international communication to promote peaceful coexistence among nations (the name of the language stems from[…]