Isolated for Six Months, Scientists in Antarctica Began to Develop Their Own Accent

They maintain that the people who drove the Neanderthals to extinction, settled Australia, and carved the Stadel lion-man were as intelligent, creative and sensitive as we are. If we were to come across the artists of the Stadel Cave, we could learn their language and they ours. We’d be able to explain to them everything we know – from the adventur

How did English prevail? In the forties, FDR and Churchill expected that they’d have to drastically alter English to turn it into a global language. Decolonization, by placing men like Manuel Quezon in power, only worsened English’s prospects. Yet English surmounted these obstacles and became a true world language. How? Part of the story, some ling

Languages change and evolve organically. But it is perhaps paradoxically necessarily that languages must remain mostly unchanging — mostly common between their speakers — such that change can be recognized and contextualized, rather than simply disorienting.

During this period, children don’t only learn their native language. They also pick up the accent of the people they grow up with, especially their peers.7 As this critical period closes, it becomes very difficult to speak like a native. This is why immigrants such as Henry Kissinger, who learned English in his teens, speak with a foreign accent.

Only very occasionally did they think about South Georgia. It was so remote, so Utopian that it was almost depressing to contemplate. No man could have endured with just that to keep him going. Instead, life was reckoned in periods of a few hours, or possibly only a few minutes—an endless succession of trials leading to deliverance from the particu

Isolated in the freezing night, they used to chant their poems huddled around fires in precarious huts, while outside the winds of the interminable arctic winters howled. If the Icelanders had spent all those nights in silence listening to the mocking wind, their minds would have soon filled with dread and despair.