Tag Archives: Language and Languages

The English language is full of wonderful words, from “anemone” and “aurora” to “zenith” and “zodiac.” But these are special occasion words, sprinkled sparingly into writing and conversation. The words in heaviest rotation are short and mundane. And they follow a remarkable statistical rule, which is universal across human languages: The most common word, which in English is “the,” is …

In 1786, a British judge named William Jones noticed striking similarities between certain words in languages, such as Sanskrit and Latin, whose speakers were separated by thousands of miles. The languages must have “sprung from some common source,” he wrote. Later generations of linguists determined that Sanskrit and Latin belong to a huge family of so-called Indo-European languages. So do …

Parents and their children, or people who know each other well, often share some expression that is unique to them — a phrase or gesture that began by happenstance but gradually acquired a meaning that only they know. The same is true of Beryl, a chimpanzee living in Kibale National Park, in Uganda, and her young daughter, Lindsay. When Lindsay …

For Wynne, the buttons are not only entirely superfluous to the communication humans and dogs already have but also potentially a distraction from their natural barks and howls, their tail wags and tucks. “I actually think that having dogs press buttons runs the risk of obscuring dogs’ voices in the sense of dogs’ expressions of themselves,” Wynne said. Rossano disagrees …