Language/Communication

Speech is quotation. That is unless someone chooses to construct a language of their own and is content to be understood by no one else. There is in practice only so far we can go in making words our own, since a word’s ability to possess meaning depends on it being shared. And virtually all [...]

Aramaic, once the common language of the entire Middle East, is one or two generations away from extinction. Ariel Sabar writes: It was a sunny morning in May, and I was in a car with a linguist and a tax preparer trolling the suburbs of Chicago for native speakers of Aramaic, the 3,000-year-old language of [...]

There are currently about 7,000 languages spoken around the world. It is estimated that by the end of this century as many as 90% of them will have become extinct. Some people might think that the fewer languages there are spoken, the more readily people will understand each other and that ideally we should all [...]

BBC News reports: Modern Indo-European languages – which include English – originated in Turkey about 9,000 years ago, researchers say. Their findings differ from conventional theory that these languages originated 5,000 years ago in south-west Russia. The New Zealand researchers used methods developed to study virus epidemics to create family trees of ancient and modern [...]

Just as much as life is threatened by the loss of species and degradation of habitats, humanity suffers irreparable loss each time a language disappears — one language dies every 14 days. Along with each of those languages, a way of understanding the world is also lost. For instance, the speakers of Tuvan, of whom [...]

Tom Bartlett writes: A Christian missionary sets out to convert a remote Amazonian tribe. He lives with them for years in primitive conditions, learns their extremely difficult language, risks his life battling malaria, giant anacondas, and sometimes the tribe itself. In a plot twist, instead of converting them he loses his faith, morphing from an [...]