Indeed, children thrown together in a community that doesn't have a language of its own will invent one in order to communicate with each other.
Steven Pinker
Language mavens commonly confuse their own peeves with a worsening of the language.
Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries... →
Look at almost any passage, and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the speaker is trying to be... →
Consciousness surely does not depend on language. Babies, many animals, and patients robbed of speech by brain damage are not insensate robots; they... →
I'm very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world.
As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children. It was... →
I don't think language could have evolved if it was the only distinctive trait. It goes hand in hand with our ability to develop tools and... →
You get the feeling that many of my guests feel that the French language gives them entry into a more cultivated, more intelligent world, more highly... →
Bernard Pivot
French is a language that makes those who speak it both calm and dynamic.