linguistics

As languages are passed on from generation to generation, the differences between them accumulate, making the languages and the worldviews they contain more and more distinct.

"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

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

When the Spanish colonizers arrived, their Christianization project began by destroying the very foundation of our indigenous faith. They broke the Anitos. They silenced the chants. They erased every ritual that didn’t serve the cross. What was once sacred became feared. What was once power became persecution.

Colonizers didn’t understand that. In... See more

The tribe, he maintains, has no collective memory that extends back more than one or two generations, and no original creation myths. Marco Antonio Gonçalves, an anthropologist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, spent eighteen months with the Pirahã in the nineteen-eighties and wrote a dissertation on the tribe’s beliefs. Gonçalves, who... See more