linguistics

Our language is not a perfectly whole picture of the world, whatever your language is. So "being an audience to conversations in a language not our own" may be an antidote for that incompleteness

Economy and Ecology both come from the same root, the Greek "oikos," meaning "home" or "household,"

"Potawatomi and most other Indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family. Because they are our family."

"Puhpowee, she explained, translates as "the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight." As a biologist, I was stunned that such a word existed. In all its technical vocabulary, Western science has no such term, no words to hold this mystery. You'd think that biologists, of all people, would have words for life. But in... See more

In English, Lakoff and Johnson say, we talk about argument through the framework—the “conceptual metaphor”—that argument is war. Among the examples they list: “He demolished my argument.” “I’ve never won an argument with him.”

Meanwhile, time is money. “You’re wasting my time,” “He’s living on borrowed time.” We also metaphorically map a huge... See more

come from the past participle of the Latin colere , which means “to tend; to guard; to till; to cultivate” and which developed into the Latin cultus , which means “care, labor; cultivation, culture; worship, reverence.”

Wait...what? Are you (like me) wondering why tilling the ground is related to worship and reverence? Hmm. The etymologists don’t... See more

Everett pointed to the word xibipío as a clue to how the Pirahã perceive reality solely according to what exists within the boundaries of their direct experience—which Everett defined as anything that they can see and hear, or that someone living has seen and heard. “When someone walks around a bend in the river, the Pirahã say that the person has... See more

Inspired by Sapir’s cultural approach to language, he hypothesized that the tribe embodies a living-in-the-present ethos so powerful that it has affected every aspect of the people’s lives. Committed to an existence in which only observable experience is real, the Pirahã do not think, or speak, in abstractions—and thus do not use color terms,... See more