A look at the famous Buffalo (repeat as necessary) sentence construction.

I saw this article (below) and had to get the buffalo-down: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/buffalo-buffalo-buffalo-buffalo-buffalo-buffalo-buffalo-buffalo/

I remember gerunds....

Actually, you say "Obama" when you meant "Osama". Here's why.... (And make sure you watch the video!)

The New England Journal of Medicine has a first-person article about the consequences of the language of economics in the doctoring biz . From the article, "A decent medical-care system that helps all the people cannot be built without the language of equity and care. If this language is permitted to die and is completely replaced by the language of efficiency and cost control, all of us - including physicians - will lose something precious."

If you've got a bit of phlegm in the throat, the Klingon alphabet is just the thing for clearing that out.

As a speaker myself of a conlang, I am always impressed when other humans willfully become weirder than we already are -- even to learning a "non-Terran" (sort of) language. And its syntax is OVS, rare here on earth, but it does exist. As Hamlet said, "taH pagh, taHbe".

In the 1960s, Michael Gazzaniga with Roger Sperry & Joseph Bogen pioneered split brain research. This video shows how one patient's language centers for comprehension and speech are now distinct due to the cutting of his corpus callosum.

The Charles Lutwidge Dodgson poem which gave the English language such portmanteau words as "chortle" and "burble" has also been put into other languages -- including Klingon and Esperanto (four versions). One also in Choctaw. How *does* one translate meaningless words?

A lot of different ways to say "Thank you." Fun to identify some of the language groups via the morphology of the phrase (but Tahitian is quite the change!)