Sublime

From this, linguists conclude that ten was the basic unit in the Germanic protolanguages that English came from, and thus those people used a base-10 number system.

The parent to all of these languages was spoken about twenty-five hundred years ago in what is now Denmark (and a ways southward) and on the southerly ends of Sweden and Norway. We will never know what the people who spoke the language called it, but linguists call it Proto-Germanic.

Churchill took these concerns seriously. In his Harvard speech, he declared his support for Basic, a drastically reduced version of English containing 850 words, only 18 of them verbs (come, get, give, go, keep, let, make, put, seem, take, be, do, have, see, say, send, may, and will). Basic was English for foreigners.

In a few remarkable pages of The Descent of Man, Darwin made the case for group selection, raised the principal objection to it, and then proposed a way around the objection: When two tribes of primeval man, living in the same country, came into competition, if (other circumstances being equal) the one tribe included a great number of courageous, s

Now that the military imperatives favoring language uniformity have largely been outstripped, we expect the national languages to fade, but not without a fight.

Our language evolved as a way of gossiping. According to this theory Homo sapiens is primarily a social animal. Social cooperation is our key for survival and reproduction. It is not enough for individual men and women to know the whereabouts of lions and bison. It’s much more important for them to know who in their band hates whom, who is sleeping

When I asked Jason via text which translation he liked, he joked “Tao de Chinga tu madre” (ah, my friends), and then specified: Stephen Mitchell.

In the end, it was the density of the Celtic words and forms in Tartessian which convinced John that Tartessian really was the oldest attested Celtic language.