If you look at the historical record, you will find that language has always been in decline. Which means, really, and it never has.
Arguments about language are usually arguments about politics, disguised and channeled through one of our most distinctive markers of identity.
And if Germans do have systematic minds, this is just as likely to be because their exceedingly erratic mother tongue has exhausted their brains' capacity to cope with any further irregularity
Africa is a huge continent; it would take several lifetimes of thousands of researchers testing in hundreds of languages to collect a valid sample of anything, especially IQ. Most Africans do their schooling in a second language, not their mother ton...
One of the series I like is D.M. Cornish's 'Monster Blood Tattoo,' in which he creates a whole language. Kids who are reading that are building a language in their heads. There's no real cognitive difference. I think kids are excited by language, and...
Even though I have spent literally years of my life trying to learn another language, any other language - and even though I have in the past claimed in several key professional contexts that I speak other languages - I am in fact still trapped insid...
We often think that language mirrors the world in which we live, and I find that's not true. The language actually makes the world in which we live. Language is not - I mean, things don't have any mutable value by themselves; we ascribe them a value.
Maurice: [to Caesar in sign language] Why coockie Rocket? Caesar: [to Maurice in sign language and breaking and bundling sticks] Ape alone... weak. Apes together... strong. Maurice: [to Caesar in sign language as they observe chimps beating each othe...
the English explorer Richard Burton told the story of an Englishman finding his new wife unconscious on the marital bed, having chloroformed herself. She had pinned a note to her nightdress which read: 'Mama says you're to do what you like.
How can Sophie hate Josh tonight when Friday morning she loved him?' I ask. What I mean is How can I have had such strong feelings for Ethan when now I don't know what I feel aside from overwhelming mortification?
It’s the bonds forged over baijiu, more than anything else, that keep me coming back for another ganbei despite the hiccups, figurative and literal. You can learn more about someone after three shots of baijiu than in years of sober tea sipping.
Why was I still traveling? Was it purely because it was better than turning around and going home, where I would have to make grown-up choices about my future? Or was I waiting to happen across a place that would tell me to stay?
During his presidency, Truman and the Republicans were locked in a series of furious assaults on each other that outraged him and made Truman an enduring foe of a party and its representatives, which he saw as on the wrong side of almost every domest...
We all have our patchwork ideas of India, our notions and opinions and prejudices–often fallacious and absurd–of this enormous, disparate country, which, as I take pleasure in reminding newcomers, bigger in population than all but its own contine...
If only…the saddest words in the English language.
Time. The most powerful word in the language. In any language.
Naturally, my body language changes given whatever environment I'm in.
The four most expensive word in the English language are 'This time it's different.
Music is healing and soothing. It is the universal language of kindness and love.
When it comes to love, the English language bears no shortage of cliches.
We probably, as primitive people, made music before we actually had a language, and that's where language comes from.
