It is a phenomenon well-established and oft-lamented that major languages often become simpler over time. As we observed in Part I, tongues from English and Latin to Mandarin Chinese shed grammatical and phonological idiosyncrasies as they became the daily languages of millions of people. How and why languages get simpler…

Anyone who speaks any language knows someone who is assiduously, perhaps annoyingly, insistent on observing the proper rules of grammar, pronunciation, et cetera. Language snobbery is nothing new: thousands of years ago, pedantic Romans wrote entire books indexing common errores in how the hoi polloi spoke Latin. Much to the…

Or, the Terribly Tricky Turkish Tongue After two years trapped in their homes, this summer a lot of people are going on long-awaited vacations. If your next trip is to somewhere where they speak a different language, you have probably given some thought to how you will scale that barrier. …

A few years ago, Google released an ad touting their next big thing: the ability to translate spoken conversations as they happen. The app could transform any smartphone into a wrecking ball for language barriers — in a world in which even prosperous European countries routinely descend into madness over…

Medieval scholars held that legere ante intellegere: reading precedes intellect. At every stage in the development of civilisation, higher rates of literacy facilitated greater economic and cultural sophistication. The first urban societies could never have risen above tribal units without a system of record-keeping that did not rely on personal…

From Jean-Jacques Rousseau onward, it has been a popular lament among philosophers that civilised society is an unnatural habitat for human beings. Linguists could make an analogous point: while spoken language is hardwired into our brains, writing is a recent development, invented by an elite few in only a small…

When Russia attacked Ukraine a few weeks ago, international observers cited all sorts of reasons for the invasion: Vladimir Putin was mad for power; he was concerned that Ukraine would join NATO; he had simply lost his mind. Few paid attention to one of his own chief justifications for why…

Linguistics, the study of how people communicate with one another, is probably the most versatile of any science, with applications from psychology to computer coding. However, for something that we all use throughout every day of our lives, the scholarly lexicon we use to describe languages can be pretty hard…

As horrified observers around the world scrambled to understand what was happening as Russian troops lunged into Ukraine, one question that kept coming up was “Why are they doing this?” Of course, lust for conquest and paranoia that a bordering state might ally with one’s enemy (i.e., NATO) are nothing…