Language
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News
Have a Foreign Language Love Affair This Summer
One morning late last autumn, I took off from London’s Heathrow Airport, my base as a Boeing 787 pilot, and…
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News
What a Linguist Hears When Biden Speaks
I don’t think anyone would be shocked to hear that linguists generally study languages, but there is a corner of…
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News
Do We Need Language to Think?
A group of neuroscientists argue that our words are primarily for communicating, not for reasoning.
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Arts
How Did We Learn to Talk? We Can’t Say for Sure.
In “The Language Puzzle,” the archaeologist Steven Mithen asks exactly how our species started speaking.
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World
Can You Lose Your Native Tongue?
It happened the first time over dinner. I was saying something to my husband, who grew up in Paris where…
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News
Some Words Feel Truer in Spanish
My earliest relationship with language was defined by rules. As an immigrant who came to this country from Peru at…
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Arts
The Invention of a Desert Tongue for ‘Dune’
Language constructors for the movies started with words Frank Herbert made up for his 1965 novel but went much further,…
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News
Lyn Hejinian, 82, Dies; Leading Light of the Language Poetry Movement
A poet, publisher and professor, she channeled the revolutionary spirit and deconstructionist currents of the 1960s to challenge the conventions…
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News
America Has No Official Language. Instead It Has Hundreds.
Nearly 400 years ago, Walloon-speaking religious refugees from near what is today roughly the French-Belgian border arrived in a Lenape-speaking…
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News
The ‘Rule’ Against Ending Sentences With Prepositions Has Always Been Silly
Late last month, Merriam-Webster shared the news on Instagram that it’s OK to end a sentence with a preposition. Hats…