Unlocking the Universe of Languages
While most languages belong to vast family trees, some stand utterly alone. These linguistic isolates, like the mysterious Basque of Spain or the endangered Ainu of Japan, have no known…
In 1958, a fictional bird called a "wug" helped solve one of the biggest mysteries of the human mind: how children learn language. The groundbreaking "Wug Test" revealed that kids…
Deep in the Amazon, linguist Daniel Everett encountered a language that seemed to break all the rules. His claim that Pirahã lacks recursion—a feature once thought to be the bedrock…