Welcome to our mailbag, where all the really great questions come from.
- Why do we say “You’re welcome”?
- How can varelse mean ‘a being’ in Swedish, but ‘a room’ in Danish?
- In sci-fi, what happens when the universal translator breaks?
Category: brain and language (page 1 of 3)
Communities need language. But a lot of the documentation is locked up in the archives.
So now linguists are teaming up with community researchers to demystify linguistic research, so that this work can be taken to their communities to help …
Imagine watching your language erode away.
How would you help it to stay alive? What can one person do in the face of language loss? There’s good news: lots of people are taking up the challenge and becoming language activists. …
Flexible. Funny. Foul.
This most versatile of English words is all of these and more. And it gets a thorough cataloging in The F-Word by lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower.
He sits down with Daniel for a chat on history, power, …
Have you ever blanked on a word and said something else?
It may not just be you. Some mild forms of anomia happen as we age, but research finds that lexical recall is not straightforward.
We’ll be hearing from you …
Wait — you mean people are doing something new in English? They sure are.
It’s happening to the word wait, and it’s been spotted by famed sociolinguist Dr Sali Tagliamonte of the University of Toronto. Do you start sentences with …
Why does language have the form it does, and why does it change the way it does?
Is it just… because? Or are there environmental motivators? Linguists are getting interested in just what factors are forming language into what it …
There are some things so nice we say them twice. And when we do, we’re using reduplication.
But this handy device can handle a surprising range of functions in the world’s languages, and it can pop up in the …
When we got numbers, things really started to happen.
How do other languages handle numbers? How do pre-linguistic children conceptualise them? And how did the development of numbers influence our development as humans?
We’re talking to anthropological linguist and author …
Grammar Day is coming soon. Which rules can you safely ignore?
Is it okay for nouns to become verbs and vice versa? What’s wrong with passive voice? And how can you have a healthy grammar outlook?
Daniel, Ben, …
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