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The Greeks distinguished six types of love: eros (sexual passion), philia (deep friendship), ludus (playful love), agape (love for everyone), pragma (longstanding love), and philautia (love of the self).

Review of "Through the Language Glass," by Guy Deutscher (who wrote that NYT article). One interesting part: "As he sums it up, "what Gladstone was proposing was nothing less than universal color blindness among the ancient Greeks." He goes on to discuss Lazarus Geiger, who "reconstructed a complete chronological sequence for the emergence of sensitivity to different prismatic colors" and asked the crucial question "Can the difference between [the ancient Greeks] and us be only in the naming, or in the perception itself?" Then there was Hugo Magnus, who decided sensitivity to colors had been evolving since ancient times..."

In the village of Antia in Greece, there is a whistled language called Sfyria. Sfyria is a whistled version of the Greek language, with different whistled tones representing Greek letters and sounds. The main benefit of Sfyria is communication over long distances. Sound from whistling travels ten times farther than from shouting. Sfyria is one of the most endangered languages in the world. Only six people can still speak and understand it.

Such a fascinating article about an obscure language, Sean! The article also notes that Sfyria is also not the only whistled language--worldwide, there are 70 other whistled languages in the world. Wild.

According to Timothy Rasinski, a literacy education professor at Kent State, teaching young students about morphology (the study of word forms) and word patterns improves their ability to gain meaning from unfamiliar words, which helps with reading overall.

"For the past three years, Brendon Ayanbadejo, a backup linebacker and standout special-teams player for the [Baltimore] Ravens, has been advocating for same-sex marriage-writing about it, talking about it, appearing as one of the stars of a video campaign launched by backers of a measure to legalize it in Maryland. It's not his day job, but he's gotten enough attention for it that an anti-gay-marriage Maryland state legislator wrote to the owner of the Ravens and demanded that he shut Ayanbadejo up."

To pun or not to pun, that is the question. Are puns the lowest form of wordplay, or an ancient art form embraced by the likes of Jesus and Shakespeare? Roman orators Cicero and Quintilian believed that "paronomasia", the Greek term for punning, was a sign of intellectual suppleness and rhetorical skill. Although often seen as annoying by detractors, puns may impart shades of meaning in an economical fashion, perhaps, or render lessons and concepts more vivid and memorable to listeners.

Believe it or not, the Internet did not give rise to procrastination. People have struggled with habitual hesitation going back to ancient civilizations. The Greek poet Hesiod, writing around 800 B.C., cautioned not to "put your work off till tomorrow and the day after." The Roman consul Cicero called procrastination "hateful" in the conduct of affairs.

It's often said that English is one of the hardest languages to learn. Given the fact that many of the words we use in English stem from Latin and Ancient Greek words - in common with many other European languages - what is it about English that has attracted this reputation for being so fearsomely difficult?

Learning a foreign language is hard. Learning English as a foreign language is also very hard. Words in the English language that we speak, say and write without question might not make sense to foreigners because of the many "exceptions" that comes with the English language. This article discusses what makes English so challenging for foreigners to learn. In particular, it gives examples of pronunciation and spelling, emphasis, homophones, synonyms, idioms, and dialects.

Africanized versions of the Arabic alphabet are collectively called "Ajami." Much as the Latin-based alphabet is used to write many languages, including English, Ajami is not a language itself, but the alphabetic script used to write a language: Arabic-derived letters to write a non-Arabic-in this case, African-language. "Ajami" derives from the Arabic a'jamiy, which means "foreigner" or, more specifically, "non-Arab." Historically, Arabs used the word to refer to all things Persian or non-Arab, a usage they borrowed from the ancient Greeks. Yet over the last few centuries, across Islamic Africa, "Ajami" came to mean an African language written in Arabic script that was often adapted phonetically to facilitate local usages and pronunciations across the continent, from the Ethiopian highlands in the east to the lush jungles of Sierra Leone in the west. The use of Ajami is tied to the religious spread of Islam. From its beginning, Islam was a literate religion. Iqra' ("read") is the first word of God's revelations to Muhammad that became the Qur'an. Knowledge of Islam meant knowledge of the revealed word of God: the Qur'an. Consequently, wherever Islam went, it established centers of learning, usually attached to mosques, where children learned to read and write Arabic in much the same way that European and American children have often been taught literacy by using the Bible. For members of African societies where oral tradition predominated, Arabic was the first written language to which they had been exposed.

English originated in England and is the dominant language in many countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia. It is also the official language of India, the Philippines, Singapore, island nations in the Carribean Sea and Pacific Ocean, and many countries in Africa, including South Africa. About a third of the world's population uses English and it is the first choice of foreign language in most other countries in the world. The parent language of English Proto-Indo-European was used about 5,000 years ago by nomads. The closest language to modern English is Frisian, used by the Dutch province of Friesland. During the course of many millennia, modern English has slowly gotten simpler and less inflected. In English, only nouns, pronouns (he, him, his), adjectives (big, bigger, biggest) and verbs are inflected. English is the only European language to use uninflected adjectives (tall man & tall woman versus Spanish el hombre alto & la mujer alta. For the verb "ride", English has 5 forms (ride, rides, rode, riding, ridden) versus German reiten that has 16 forms. The simplification and loss of inflection has made English more flexible functionally and more open in vocabulary. English has "borrowed" words from other languages (e.g. cannibal, cigar, guerrilla, matador, mosquito, tornado, vanilla, etc. From Greek, English "borrowed": alchemy, alcohol, algebra, arsenal, assassin, elixir, mosque, sugar, syrup, zero, cipher etc. From Hebrew is: amen, hallelujah, manna, messiah, seraph, leviathan, shibboleth, etc. There are many other words in the English dictionary that are taken from other languages. Many countries speak or use English, but not in the same way we use it. The article is very long and goes through phonology (sounds), morphology inflection (grammar forms of tense, case, voice, person, gender, etc), composition, syntax (sentence forms), vocabulary, orthography (spelling systems) of English. It also gives

There are as many as 800 languages spoken in New York City, and nowhere in the world has more than Queens, according to the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA). You can see many of the languages in the article's map, which is featured in " Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas " by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro. The five miles from Astoria to Forest Hills have a dense progression of languages: Greek, Filipino, Urdu, Indonesian, Russian, Japanese, Lithuanian, and others, including more obscure ones like Chavacano, Waray-Waray, Minangkabau, and Bukharian.

This article talked about how language has an influence on how we perceive time. Researchers first found this to be true in bilinguals, as they are capable of code-switching. After, researchers were able to identify that each language perceives time in different durations. Also, bilingual speakers, when switching between languages, use the specific time duration measure of that language.

Some languages, like Swedish and English, describe time as length. Other languages, like Spanish and Greek, describe time as size. These differences in language lead to differences in how people perceive time. Spanish-Swedish bilinguals' perception of time changes depending on the language they are thinking in.

Over the years, we have found that our words come from different parts of the brain. In addition the part of the brain which we use to formulate thoughts into sentences, we also use the part of the brain that deals with emotion when we swear. Researchers discovered that patients with neurodegenerative diseases like a stroke, were still able to swear. Studying patients with Tourette syndrome have also proved that swearing uses many areas of the brain. Since swearing involves the emotional part of the brain, we know that profanity is used to express intense emotions.

Regular speech is generated in the left hemisphere, in an area of the brain close to the surface. The cerebral cortex, or "gray matter," is often associated with higher thought processes such as thought and action. "It's sophisticated," says Bergen, "and comports with the idea of what it means to be human." Swearing, on the other hand, is generated much deeper in the brain, in regions that are older and more primitive in evolutionary terms, says Bergen. These regions are often found in the right hemisphere in the brain's emotional center, the limbic system."These are words that express intense emotions-surprise, frustration, anger, happiness, fear," says psychologist and linguist Timothy Jay, who began studying profanity more than 40 years ago."[Swearing] serves my need to vent, and it conveys my emotions to other people very effectively and symbolically," he says. "Where other animals like to bite and scratch each other, I can say 'f*ck you' and you get my contempt-I don't have to do it physically." Profanity serves other purposes, too. Lovers use it as part of enticing sex talk; athletes and soldiers use it to forge camaraderie; and people in positions of power use it to reaffirm their superiority. Profanity is even used as a celebratory expression, says Adams, citing "F*ck yeah!" as an example. The meaning of a profanity, like any other word, changes with time, culture and context. While swear words have been around since Greek and Roman times, and maybe even earlier, the types of things people consider offensive have changed. "People of the Middle Ages had no problems talking about sex or excrement, that was not their hang-up," Adams explains. "Their hang-up was talking about God disrespectfully...so that was what a profanity was."

The left hemisphere of the brain is responsible for emotions like happiness, sadness, and anger. The part of the brain that we use to formulate thoughts into sentences is that part that we also use to deal with emotion when we swear. Different studies done on people found with brain issues/diseases allowed researchers to understand that profanity is used to express the extreme emotions.

President Joe Biden and Dr. Anthony Fauci mispronounced the new COVID variant at a recent White House speech, calling the variant "omnicron" instead of the Greek letter "omicron." However, linguists explain that this is an expected error, as it is common for humans to take words from other languages and 'nativize' foreign sounds to make it more natural-sounding in their mother tongue. The abundance of English words with the prefix omni- seems to serve like a magnet, drawing in speakers to the similar set of letters and tempting speakers to mispronounce the omi- prefix as "omnicron."