Unlocking the Universe of Languages
Who broke the window? The choice between saying "The boy broke the window" and "The window broke" is more than just grammar. This linguistic feature, known as transitivity, profoundly shapes…
Did you know that many languages, like Mandarin Chinese and Finnish, get by perfectly well without a grammatical future tense? This seemingly minor linguistic detail may have a profound impact…
In English, we use optional phrases like "I heard" or "I saw" to show how we know something. But in many languages, this information is mandatory and baked directly into…
For most English speakers, "The dog chased the cat" is the only logical way to say it. But what if we told you that for over half the world, the…
Deep in the Amazon, linguist Daniel Everett encountered a language that seemed to break all the rules. His claim that Pirahã lacks recursion—a feature once thought to be the bedrock…
Far from being simple pantomime, sign languages are a testament to the human brain's linguistic ingenuity. These visual-gestural systems possess all the grammatical complexity of spoken languages, from their unique…
In the annals of linguistic anecdotes, few stories are as enduring, entertaining or illuminating as the exchange attributed to the irrepressible Sir Winston Churchill about...