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The importance of FOXP2, and how it affects language.

People have a deep desire to communicate with animals, as is evident from the way they converse with their dogs, enjoy myths about talking animals or devote lifetimes to teaching chimpanzees how to speak. A delicate, if tiny, step has now been taken toward the real thing: the creation of a mouse with a human gene for language.

People have a deep desire to communicate with animals, as is evident from the way they converse with their dogs, enjoy myths about talking animals or devote lifetimes to teaching chimpanzees how to speak. A delicate, if tiny, step has now been taken toward the real thing: the creation of a mouse with a human gene for language.

"...a desire in Hollywood to infuse fantasy and science-fiction movies, television series and video games with a sense of believability is driving demand for constructed languages, complete with grammatical rules, a written alphabet (hieroglyphics are acceptable) and enough vocabulary for basic conversations. ... "The days of aliens spouting gibberish with no grammatical structure are over," said Paul R. Frommer ... who created Na'vi, the language spoken by the giant blue inhabitants of Pandora in "Avatar." ... fans rewatched Dothraki scenes to study the language in a workshop-like setting. ... There have been many attempts to create languages, often for specific political effect. In the 1870s, a Polish doctor invented Esperanto ... The motivation to learn an auxiliary language is not so different from why people pick up French or Italian, she said. "Learning a language, even a natural language, is more of an emotional decision than a practical one. It's about belonging to a group," she said. ... The watershed moment for invented languages was the creation of a Klingon language ... But as with any language, there is a certain snob appeal built in. Among Dothraki, Na'vi and Klingon speakers, a divide has grown between fans who master the language as a linguistic challenge, and those who pick up a few phrases because they love the mythology." Reaction on Language Log: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3628 - "there's an attitude among some linguists - and also plenty of non-linguists, as is evident from many of the comments on the NYT piece - that engaging in conlang activity is a waste of time, perhaps even detrimental to the real subject matter of linguistics."

Author Clive Thompson argues, "The fact that so many of us are writing - sharing our ideas, good and bad, for the world to see - has changed the way we think. Just as we now live in public, so do we think in public. And that is accelerating the creation of new ideas and the advancement of global knowledge." Every day, we collectively produce millions of books' worth of writing. Globally we send 154.6 billion emails, more than 400 million tweets, and over 1 million blog posts and around 2 million blog comments on WordPress. On Facebook, we post about 16 billion words. Altogether, we compose some 3.6 trillion words every day on email and social media - the equivalent of 36 million books.* (The entire US Library of Congress, by comparison, holds around 23 million books.) He notes the Internet has spawned a global culture of avid writers, one almost always writing for an audience, and suggests that writing for a real audience helps clarify one's thinking, enhances learning, and arguably, betters writers' organization, ideas, and attention to editing.

"So to sum up: language is a collective human creation, reflecting human nature -- how we conceptualize reality, how we relate to one another -- and by analyzing the various quirks and complexities of language, I think we can get a window onto what makes us tick."

A great insight on how revealing of our personalities our use of language can be.

"He clearly had a magic touch with language and understood that his sleek words were crucial selling points for Apple's equally sleek products. Looking back at Jobs's key words and phrases, we find that some were his own creations while others came from his Apple colleagues, but all seem to bear the Jobsian imprint."

1. What do you say to embarrass a polar bear? 2. How might an underwater society write? 3. Can a creature without teeth say "tooth"? 4. How many verbs for "to pray" does an angel need? These are some of the questions students have pondered in "Invented Languages" at Stephen F.

SNL faces criticism for appropriating AAVE in a sketch about "Gen Z slang". This becomes largely problematic as it comes to mind that most of the SNL cast is white. The creation and airing of this skit clearly shows a lack of education from the writers and performers on SNL in regards to AAVE.

An overview of the theory of "universal grammar" and how it led to the creation of "generative syntax", the gathering of linguistic data, and ultimately the exploration of different aspects of cognition and the brain.

Since the creation of advertisements, its hard for people to go a day without seeing at least one ad on TV, outside, or online. It's like impossible. However with the increasing amount of advertisements people see everyday, research shows that it is harder to retain what you saw. As a result, advertisers are reverting to a newer method called linguistic synaesthesia which is a type of metaphor created by combining linguistic expressions which evoke multiple senses at one time. Read the article to find out more examples of linguistic synaesthesia.

In 2017, Jonathan Harrington, University of Munich linguist, studied a group of British scientists isolated for four months in Antarctica, and found that their pronunciation of key words began becoming more phonologically similar. These findings lend credence to a phenomenon observed by linguists regarding how new languages evolve. Isolation leads to subtle accent changes, followed by the development of dialects, and eventually over a broad timespan, whole new tongues.

Linguist Victor Mair references Caleb Madison's article in the "The Good Word" column of The Atlantic (1/24/22): "Why We're All Shooketh: The term is online slang of Biblical proportions". The phrase I'm shooketh was first uttered by the comedian Christine Sydelko in a YouTube video uploaded to her account in 2017 (she was expressing her shock at having been recognized by a fan at Boston Market). The adjective shooketh took off as a way to lend biblical proportions to awestruck confusion. But the linguistic journey to its creation spans the evolution of the English language, connecting Early Modern English, turn-of-the-century adventure novels, and Twitter slang. In the original article, Madison noted that when we want to transform verbs like shake into adjectives, we typically use something called a participle, either present or past. The present participle of shake is shaking, as in "I'm shaking." The past participle would be "I'm shaken." But in the 19th century, the simple past tense, shook, took hold. As for the "eth" part, Mair notes that this suffix was used in Early Modern English (think Shakespeare and the King James Bible) to put verbs in the third-person present tense, e.g. "she loveth." Soon, -eth simplified to just -s, but we still use the form when we need to give our verbs a little extra ancient oomph. It just wouldn't be as momentous to say "The Lord gives and the Lord takes away!" And it certainly wouldn't be as cool to say "I'm shooks." But our distance from the Elizabethan era allows -eth to reappear with no tense tension. Instead, it simply adds a wry dramatic flourish to the feeling of being shook. If using shook dials the shock of shaken up a notch, adding -eth pushes the intensity to 11, expressing a holy and almost sublime desire in the face of inexplicable events. Shooketh yokes together a punchy modern verbal innovation with a dramatic formal relic of early English to communicate a shaking of biblical propor

This article describes a linguistic experiment that took place in Antarctica in 2017-2018. Scientists going to Antarctica were surveyed on their pronunciation of specific words, and by the end of the four month trip, the team pronounced one of the words in a different way to their individual original pronunciation. This illustrates that accents form through prolonged social and geographical isolation.