Sublime

Air traffic controllers, then scientists, then internet users. As each increasingly large technical community adopted English, the momentum grew. Whole countries—some containing hundreds of millions of people who have never attended a scientific conference and may not even use the internet often—were dragged into the vortex.

The preposition rule was cooked up in the seventeenth century under the impression that because Latin doesn’t end sentences in prepositions, English shouldn’t.

For decades, linguists of all persuasions, both nativists and culturalists, have been trotting out the same party line: all languages are equally complex. But I will argue that this refrain is merely an empty slogan and that the evidence suggests that the complexity of some areas of grammar reflects the culture of the speakers, often in unexpected

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.

This is a “rich get richer” sort of model in which the more a word is used in the past, the more likely it is that it will attract more use in the future.

myth that nonstandard dialects of English are grammatically deficient is widespread.

sentences behaved like a mathematical multifractal: