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This article discusses the history of Trinidad Creole English, also known as TCE. It explains the history, sociolinguistic situation, and phonology of TCE. Published by The Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online, this factual page contains statistics and a detailed overview of how TCE came about and how it has evolved throughout the years. There are charts of Trinidad's population and the languages spoken in Trinidad & Tobago. The article includes lists of practice sentences and pronunciation lessons.

Copied from Youtube description: "How did humans acquire language? In this lecture, best-selling author Steven Pinker introduces you to linguistics, the evolution of spoken language, and the debate over the existence of an innate universal grammar. He also explores why language is such a fundamental part of social relationships, human biology, and human evolution. Finally, Pinker touches on the wide variety of applications for linguistics, from improving how we teach reading and writing to how we interpret law, politics, and literature."

Here is a quick list of some benefits of reading!

New ways to grab dinner, the trick to using a tool, and learning the local dialect. These are behaviors that animals pick up from each other. K iller whales, chimpanzees, and birds seem to have a cultural component to their lives. Now a new study suggests that sperm whales should be added to that list.

Just seeing a list of negative words for a few seconds will make a highly anxious or depressed person feel worse, and the more you ruminate on them, the more you can actually damage key structures that regulate your memory, feelings, and emotions.But negative words, spoken with anger, do even more damage. They send alarm messages through the brain, interfering with the decision making centers in the frontal lobe, and this increases a person's propensity to act irrationally. Fear-provoking words-like poverty, illness, and death-also stimulate the brain in negative ways. And even if these fearful thoughts are not real, other parts of your brain (like the thalamus and amygdala) react to negative fantasies as though they were actual threats occurring in the outside world. Curiously, we seem to be hardwired to worry-perhaps an artifact of old memories carried over from ancestral times when there were countless threats to our survival.

Clearly I am in a judgmental phase. When I saw this year's list of words that Merriam-Webster Unabridged has added to its pages, I groaned with dismay a few times. Normally I love learning new words, and I hadn't known a lot of these words, but some seemed pointless.

What makes a politician, or a person, authentic? This article lists off the various definitions of authenticity, according to ancient meanings, famed psychologists like Freud and Rousseau, and political pundits. In the past, the politicians deemed authentic by the public were those that were the most likable, a very interesting standpoint. However, it now seems that a politician that cares about what's in his heart, like Trump, is now thought of as being authentic.

The UN Atlas of Endangered Languages lists 18 languages with only one remaining speaker. With about one language disappearing every two weeks, some of these have probably already died off. The following 18 languages were last known to have one remaining speaker.

In a nod to changing social norms and the rise of feminism, France expurgates "mademoiselle" from its list of acceptable social honorifics. One of my former students, a Francophile living in Europe, snarkily notes that while the French are at it, they should reinstate "mondemoiseau"--a title designating men who'd not reached "chevalier", or knightly status.

Just in time to celebrate the Year of the Dragon, a comprehensive listing of lucky foods to eat for Chinese New Year. Generally, these foods fall into two categories: they either physically resemble lucky objects (e.g. dumplings look like gold ingots, carrot rounds look like coins) or are homophonic with auspicious phrases (e.g. "ye zi"= coconut, sounds like the words for "father/son", conveying the idea of harmonious parent-child relations). Food for thought.

"You, hear me! Give this fire to that old man. Pull the black worm off the bark and give it to the mother. And no spitting in the ashes!" It's an odd little speech. But if you went back 15,000 years and spoke these words to hunter-gatherers in Asia in any one of hundreds of modern languages, there is a chance they would understand at least some of what you were saying. That's because all of the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in the four sentences are words that have descended largely unchanged from a language that died out as the glaciers retreated at the end of the last Ice Age. Those few words mean the same thing, and sound almost the same, as they did then. While traditionally, it's been thought that words can't survive for more than 8,000 to 9,000 years, a team of researchers from the University of Reading has come up with a list of two dozen "ultraconserved words" that have survived 150 centuries. It includes some predictable entries: "mother," "not," "what," "to hear" and "man." It also contains surprises: "to flow," "ashes" and "worm." The existence of the long-lived words suggests there was a "proto-Eurasiatic" language that was the common ancestor to about 700 contemporary languages that are the native tongues of more than half the world's people.

What are the world's most common languages? Estimating these most common language populations can be tricky, and there is a range of data available. Quiz yourself: see how many of these most common languages you can name before looking at the list. You might find some languages that surprise you!

This is a list of many quotes from famous people that contains some paraprosdokian phrases

An alphabetical list of just about every slang word you can think of in the 1950's

"It's what you've been craving. Peaceful sleep without a struggle. That's what Lunesta is all about: helping most people fall asleep quickly, and stay asleep all through the night. It is easy to see that this text presents an argument directed towards getting the readers of the ad to buy Lunesta. However, it may be a little harder at first to see what the premises are that are put forward to support this conclusion, and what the form of the argument is. The argument evidently has some sort of structure, but it may not be apparent what that structure is. We begin by making a so-called key list of the statements that make up the explicit premises and conclusion of the argument."

"the researchers discovered, the more data-dense the average syllable is, the fewer of those syllables had to be spoken per second - and the slower the speech thus was. English, with a high information density of .91, is spoken at an average rate of 6.19 syllables per second. Mandarin, which topped the density list at .94, was the spoken slowpoke at 5.18 syllables per second. ... Despite those differences, at the end of, say, a minute of speech, all of the languages would have conveyed more or less identical amounts of information."