“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” observed philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1922. We might ask, accordingly, how does language shape reality, arbitrating human experience of ...

Wild chimpanzees alter the meaning of single calls when embedding them into diverse call combinations, mirroring linguistic operations in human language. Human language, however, allows an infinite ...

Much has been said about the remarkable ability humans have to extract meaning from language. That ability is remarkable indeed. In a split second, we perceive a spoken or written word and immediately ...

(RNS) — In 1712, Jonathan Swift, the Anglican clergyman most famous for his brilliant satire, published “A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue.” Complaining that the ...

Some time ago, I fell into conversation with a colleague about what we had been reading lately, and the person suggested that I absolutely must give Henry James’s “The Ambassadors” a try. The pandemic ...

If you asked a multilingual friend which language they find more emotional, the answer would usually be their mother tongue—the one they used while growing up and probably still use at home. This does ...

After all, if an algorithm can render speech in real time, why should universities keep investing in language degrees? But ...

Much has been said about the remarkable ability humans have to extract meaning from language. That ability is remarkable indeed. In a split second, we perceive a spoken or written word and immediately ...