Sublime

The so-called “innateness hypothesis”—the idea that we are born with a specific capacity for language—became mainstream, and linguistic departments across the world reoriented themselves: one of their key tasks was now to join in attempts to reveal the precise workings of the genetic blueprint.

In his apprenticeship in the jungles of the Amazon that would later lead to his career as a groundbreaking linguist, Daniel Everett came upon a truth that has application far beyond his field of study. What prevents people from learning, even something as difficult as Pirahã, is not the subject itself—the human mind has limitless capabilities—but r

really don’t amount to much. Language is the most difficult thing of all to learn. It’s an incredibly long, frighteningly difficult process. At eighteen months old, hardly anything we babble is intelligible. And yet we keep on trying all day long. It’s enough to get you down, but we never give it up. No one ever says: “Language, that’s really not m

and the Candushi tribe in Peru don’t even bother having words for colors.

what really struck him about the ‘primitive’ societies he was most familiar with was their tolerance of eccentricity. This, he concluded, was simply the logical extension of that same rejection of coercion that so impressed the Jesuits in Quebec. If, he noted, a Winnebago decided that gods or spirits did not really exist and refused to perform ritu

quando os colonos chegaram na América, além de proibirem as línguas nativas, mudavam os nomes das pessoas.)

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.

If he did skip a day, who knew what he might miss? The celebrated primate researcher Jane Goodall didn’t even have a college degree when she was assigned to watch chimpanzees in Tanzania, Rick liked to remind people, yet she was the first to record them using twigs as tools for fishing termites out of the ground, a discovery that upended the conven