Current Linguistics
Could Neanderthals handle language variation?
Also this week: Jane Goodall dies at 91 + Merriam-Webster adds 5,000 words to the dictionary
Current Linguistics
Learning a second language can teach you to distinguish colors you don’t have in your first language
Also this week: Gesture may have been the origin of language + A new mind-reading AI can turn imagined speech into words. Here’s what happened this week in language and linguistics.
Current Linguistics
Did technology drive the evolution of language? Or was it music?
Here’s what happened this week in language and linguistics.
Current Linguistics
Islands are incubators of linguistic diversity, and people are more likely to cooperate with those who use similar linguistic constructions
Here’s what happened this week in language and linguistics.
Current Linguistics
When did humans develop language? + How whistle languages work
When language evolved, how whistled languages work, and what alien languages might be like. Here’s what happened this week in language and linguistics.
Newsletter
Did Kanzi the bonobo understand language?
Kanzi the bonobo, who learned language, made stone tools, and played Minecraft, dies at age 44. What can his remarkable linguistic abilities teach us about language?
Current Linguistics
1,000 subscribers! 🎉 And did Proto-Indo-European have SOV word order?
The Linguistic Discovery newsletter just reached 1,000 subscribers! 🎉 And linguist Danny L. Bate suggests that Proto-Indo-European didn’t have Subject-Object-Verb word order after all.
Newsletter
What alien languages can teach us about human language: The linguistics of The Three-Body Problem
Imagine if every word you thought could be heard by everyone around you. In this world, thinking would be the same as communicating. What would language—and society—be like?