Author Archives: brinton

It seems that prosody (of the language heard in the womb) can affect how a baby cries: https://parenting.nytimes.com/baby/wermke-prespeech-development-wurzburg

This collection of important Old English artifacts was discovered in 2009. Scholars have spent the last decade analyzing it:

It doesn’t have exactly the meaning in which it is currently being used: https://edition.pagesuite.com/popovers/dynamic_article_popover.aspx?artguid=a1ab119b-8403-4abb-9433-52b366aa4fab&appid=1165

In 2012, Sweden introduced the gender-neutral pronoun hen. See what happened: https://www.wired.com/story/actually-gender-neutral-pronouns-can-change-a-culture/?mbid=email_onsiteshare

Read about the variety of English unique to Korea: https://theconversation.com/korean-language-speakers-should-take-pride-in-konglish-its-another-wonderful-example-of-linguistic-diversity-118790

Why is it that we can say “a beautiful large old square blue Persian rug”, but not “an old Persian square blue large beautiful rug”? With just a few exceptions, adjectives must appear in a set order, which we all … Continue reading →

We may think that words such as (un)friend or hipster are recent additions to the vocabulary, but a brief dip into the Oxford English Dictionary reveals their longer histories: http://mentalfloss.com/article/51857/16-words-are-much-older-they-seem

This article, accompanying a recent show at the British Library, provides a fascinating history of English through its material remains: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20190118-how-migration-formed-the-english-language

Like many indigenous languages, sign languages of the world may also be endangered: https://theconversation.com/sign-languages-are-fully-fledged-natural-languages-with-their-own-dialects-they-need-protecting-109388

Children in a Lajamanu, Australia, have developed a new language called “Light Warlpiri”. They use sentence structures from Warlpiri, but verbs from Kriol and nouns from English, Warlpiri, and Kriol. https://www.sapiens.org/language/new-languages-discovered/