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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.
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Speaking of Words: Verb Tense and Verb Aspect
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Tense can be defined as the point on the time-line that the action expressed by the verb takes place, with reference to the act of speaking, and in English there are three such points: past, present, and future. Quite a few languages have more than three.
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Speaking of Words: Can Artificial Intelligence Learn a Language?
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And we have SIRI and her knowledgeable sisters who will answer all our questions quickly and amiably; recently we learned that SIRI will be “enhanced” with ChatGPT4 and OpenAI.