Language
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Newyork
Have a Foreign Language Love Affair This Summer
One morning late last autumn, I took off from London’s Heathrow Airport, my base as a Boeing 787 pilot, and landed the next morning at Haneda Airport in Tokyo. By early afternoon I was walking under the turning foliage of Rikugien, one of my favorite ...
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Newyork
What a Linguist Hears When Biden Speaks
I don’t think anyone would be shocked to hear that linguists generally study languages, but there is a corner of the discipline that studies something slightly different: pidgins. That’s the word that linguists use to describe the mashup that can ...
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Science
Do We Need Language to Think?
A group of neuroscientists argue that our words are primarily for communicating, not for reasoning.
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Books
How Did We Learn to Talk? We Can’t Say for Sure.
In “The Language Puzzle,” the archaeologist Steven Mithen asks exactly how our species started speaking.
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World
Can You Lose Your Native Tongue?
It happened the first time over dinner. I was saying something to my husband, who grew up in Paris where we live, and suddenly couldn’t get the word out. The culprit was the “r.” For the previous few months, I had been trying to perfect the French “r ...
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Newyork
Some Words Feel Truer in Spanish
My earliest relationship with language was defined by rules. As an immigrant who came to this country from Peru at age 4, I spent half of my days in kindergarten occupied with learning the rules of the English language. There was the tricky ...
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Books
The Invention of a Desert Tongue for ‘Dune’
Language constructors for the movies started with words Frank Herbert made up for his 1965 novel but went much further, creating an extensive vocabulary and specific grammar rules.
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Newyork
Lyn Hejinian, 82, Dies; Leading Light of the Language Poetry Movement
A poet, publisher and professor, she channeled the revolutionary spirit and deconstructionist currents of the 1960s to challenge the conventions of poetry.
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Newyork
America Has No Official Language. Instead It Has Hundreds.
Nearly 400 years ago, Walloon-speaking religious refugees from near what is today roughly the French-Belgian border arrived in a Lenape-speaking archipelago, marking the colonial founding of Manhattan as we know it. Ever more global waves of ...
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Newyork
The ‘Rule’ Against Ending Sentences With Prepositions Has Always Been Silly
Late last month, Merriam-Webster shared the news on Instagram that it’s OK to end a sentence with a preposition. Hats off to them, sincerely. But it is hard to convey how bizarre, to an almost comical degree, such a decree seems in terms of how ...