Language
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Arts
How Did We Learn to Talk? We Can’t Say for Sure.
In “The Language Puzzle,” the archaeologist Steven Mithen asks exactly how our species started speaking.
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World
Can You Lose Your Native Tongue?
It happened the first time over dinner. I was saying something to my husband, who grew up in Paris where we live, and suddenly couldn’t get the word out. The culprit was the “r.” For the previous few months, I had been trying to perfect the French “r ...
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World
Some Words Feel Truer in Spanish
My earliest relationship with language was defined by rules. As an immigrant who came to this country from Peru at age 4, I spent half of my days in kindergarten occupied with learning the rules of the English language. There was the tricky ...
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Arts
The Invention of a Desert Tongue for ‘Dune’
Language constructors for the movies started with words Frank Herbert made up for his 1965 novel but went much further, creating an extensive vocabulary and specific grammar rules.
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World
Lyn Hejinian, 82, Dies; Leading Light of the Language Poetry Movement
A poet, publisher and professor, she channeled the revolutionary spirit and deconstructionist currents of the 1960s to challenge the conventions of poetry.
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World
America Has No Official Language. Instead It Has Hundreds.
Nearly 400 years ago, Walloon-speaking religious refugees from near what is today roughly the French-Belgian border arrived in a Lenape-speaking archipelago, marking the colonial founding of Manhattan as we know it. Ever more global waves of ...
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World
The ‘Rule’ Against Ending Sentences With Prepositions Has Always Been Silly
Late last month, Merriam-Webster shared the news on Instagram that it’s OK to end a sentence with a preposition. Hats off to them, sincerely. But it is hard to convey how bizarre, to an almost comical degree, such a decree seems in terms of how ...
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Health
More Screen Time Means Less Parent-Child Talk, Study Finds
The News Credit...Jessica Kourkounis for The New York TimesAccording to new research, “technoference” is real. Toddlers who are exposed to more screen time have fewer conversations with their parents or caregivers by an array of measures. They say ...
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Arts
How to Speak New York
LANGUAGE CITY: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York, by Ross Perlin “Up on the sixth floor of an old commercial building along the sunless canyon of 18th Street, there is a room where languages from all over the world converge ...
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World
Where Did Our Strange Use of ‘Like’ Come From?
Some months ago, one of my readers sent me an invaluable cache of recordings of family members during therapy sessions in the 1960s. They are ordinary, seemingly educated, white Northeasterners ranging from their late 20s to late middle age speaking ...