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How Did Human Language Get Started?
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Well, all right, there are a few ideas, based on a few facts, but they don’t amount to an explanation, not yet anyway.
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The Double French Invasion
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A few years ago my wife and I flew on Icelandair to Europe. On one of the doors in the airplane was the word Neytharutgangur.
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Are All Languages Alike?
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It sounds absurd even to ask if all languages are alike, or even somewhat alike, as anyone studying a foreign language for the first time will attest. Who could say such a thing?
Speaking of Words: Arabic Words in English
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All languages borrow words from neighboring languages, and if a language has great geographical spread, as English has, it will absorb countless numbers of them.
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Speaking of Words: The Grammar You Already Know
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Suppose you never had a teacher who taught you “grammar,” by which I mean how to diagram sentences, distinguish singular versus plural possessives, avoid dangling participles, and the like, along with spelling.
Environment & Science
Speaking of Words: Chipmunks, Skunks, Woodchucks, and Moose
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But more interesting, at least to word-collectors like me, is that their names all come from Native American languages. They don’t look like it.
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Speaking of Words: Count Nouns and Mass Nouns
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Poets have sometimes exploited the possibility of squeezing mass nouns into the count-noun category.
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Absolute Clauses: Sometimes Just the Right Thing To Say
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“All things considered” is another common example, so common that since 1971 it has been the name of a news program on National Public Radio. Here the participle is “considered.”
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Speaking of Words: We Might as Well Wear Togas
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If you were a senator from the ancient Roman Republic who had managed to learn some English while riding in your time-chariot to visit Washington DC for the first time, you would be astonished, and quite amused, at how familiar things looked and sounded, over two thousand years later and across a great ocean.