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Perro, chien, hund, sobaka, kelev, mbwa, animush, inu. No, those aren't the ingredients for tonight's special at a vegetarian restaurant--at least, one hopes not: they're all words for the creature we who speak English would call a dog. At first glance, the languages from which those words come would seem to have little in common with each other--but linguists will tell you that, in reality, all human languages are remarkably similar; not in their specific vocabulary, but in the way they are organized.
Modern human language has existed roughly as long as modern homo sapiens--maybe 40,000 years. Before that, the Neanderthals probably had some form of language, but since the latest DNA evidence ...
Posted by Edward Willett at 11:11, July 15th, 1997 under Blog, Columns, Science Columns |
With the season about to tilt from summer to autumn, Canada geese are once more filling the air with their melodious sounds as they prepare to fly south for the winter.
To us, of course, the sound of a flock of geese "talking" to each other is more or less the same as the sound of a downtown street corner during a traffic jam, but all that honking must mean something, mustn't it?
Well, yes, it must, but not in the way we think of sounds having meaning. Geese honk, dogs bark, cats meow and cows moo, but only humans (as far as we know) use sound to communicate abstract ideas rather than immediate emotional states. ...
Posted by Edward Willett at 11:51, September 18th, 1995 under Blog, Columns, Science Columns |