""Wait, what?" you may be asking yourself. "Mele" for "merry", OK - obviously /l/ is the closest thing to /r/ in Hawaiian, we're used to that from stereotypes (and even facts) about Japanese and other varieties of "Engrish".  But where did that kalikimaka come from?"

"Your question is really asking, "What is a syllable?" For the most part, our original grammar school understanding that "A syllable is a part of a word with a single vowel sound" is essentially correct, but there's more to it than that. Let's look at a linguistic defintion of "syllable":..."

Graphically compare the popularity of phrases over time.

See also the graphs at the bottom of the page. "Perhaps the biggest collection of words ever assembled has just gone online: 500 billion of them, from 5 million books published over the past four centuries... The words make up a searchable database that researchers at Harvard say is a new and powerful tool to study cultural change... You can, for instance, type in a word or a short phrase, and the database produces a graph - a curve that traces how often an author used those words every year since 1800."

"We've also had wars on drugs, obesity, idleness, poverty, oil-price speculators, science, saturated fat (part of the "battle of the spreads"), and Waitrose (the aggressor was M&S)... Then, of course, there's the "war on terror", George W Bush's response to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001."

"It is well known that if a familiar word be stared at for a time, or repeated aloud over and over again, the meaning drops away. ... They found that after saying a word aloud 2-3 times per second for 15 seconds, subjects' estimates of its position in this semantic space moved to a point nearer the origin [it became more meaningless to the speaker]."

"This shows that our brain has a complex sensitivity to our own speech that helps us distinguish between our vocalizations and those of others, and makes sure that what we say is actually what we meant to say," Flinker says.... While the study doesn't specifically address why humans need to track their own speech so closely, Flinker theorizes that, among other things, tracking our own speech is important for language development, monitoring what we say and adjusting to various noise environments.

Notes about Chaucer's writing, including his "golden rule" (polyvocality), and favorite trick ("conjuring new words to make lines rhyme or scan").

"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."

"Barack Obama's speeches are much admired and endlessly analysed, but, says Charlotte Higgins, one of their most interesting aspects is the enormous debt they owe to the oratory of the Romans"

After a short survey, it gives you an estimate of how many words you know. See also: http://testyourvocab.com/hard.php

"Brain scans of modern stone-tool makers show that key areas in the brain's right hemisphere become more active when they switch from making stone flakes to more advanced tools. Intriguingly, some of these brain regions are involved in language processing... 'Our study reinforces the idea that toolmaking and language evolved together as both required more complex thought.'"

"David [Harrison] and Greg [Anderson] will circle the planet to hear the last whispers of a dying language. They are The Linguists." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Linguists

"Christian missionaries have become strangely vital to conserving endangered languages... In 1951 Pittman had started interviewing missionaries and linguists about the languages that were spoken in the parts of the world where they worked. The result was a language catalogue called Ethnologue... For example, the Spanish priests who followed the conquistadors into South America documented indigenous languages as they went."

"The human knowledge base is eroding as we lose languages, exacerbated by the fact that most of them have never been written down or recorded... Each language is a unique expression of human creativity... it seems premature to begin constructing grand theories of universal grammar...If we can learn to value the intellectual diversity that is fostered by linguistic variety, we can all help to ensure its survival."

From the "frisk" to the "freedom pat."

"Birds learn to sing their songs and babies learn to make the sounds of their language in the same way.... Furthermore, both birds and humans go through a period [critical period] when learning is best accomplished... the brain architecture supporting babbling and birdsong is similar...the same mutated gene, FOXP2, is implicated in both [birdsong and speech]."

"Susan Levine finds that simply repeating the numbers isn't as good as helping kids understand what they mean... "Counting objects and saying, 'Oh, you have four cars: one, two, three, four,' while you point at them - seems to be better," Levine says."

French and German, like other Romance language, have masculine and feminine forms of nouns, and "when referring to several people by their role... and the gender of that group is either not known, irrelevant or mixed," they will use the masculine form. However, the masculine form used in this way is traditionally thought to be generic - but "the French and German participants took longer to say that the second sentence made sense if it referred to women."

"Consistent with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, participants were quicker at distinguishing between a 'green' and a 'blue' than between two 'greens' or two 'blues', but crucially, this advantage only pertained when the colours appeared on the right-hand side of space [when the brain is using the "language-dominant left hemisphere"]."