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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.

Charles Seife • Zero

The German polymath Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), brother of the famous explorer Alexander von Humboldt, likewise tried to develop a universalist and philosophical approach to the study of languages. The central fact of language is that speakers can make infinite use of the finite resources provided by their language. Though the capacity for

Bill Mayblin • Introducing Linguistics

Gordon surmised that the Pirahã provided support for a controversial hypothesis advanced early in the last century by Benjamin Lee Whorf, a student of Sapir’s. Whorf argued that the words in our vocabulary determine how we think. Since the Pirahã do not have words for numbers above two, Gordon wrote, they have a limited ability to work with... See more

Link

Air traffic control and scientific research turned out to be mere preludes. The most powerful force for anglicization has been the internet. It has promoted international communication, but it has set English proficiency as the price. The Internet was invented in the United States and has been disproportionately Anglophone ever since. In 1997 a

Daniel Immerwahr • How to Hide an Empire

All languages covey information at a similar rate when spoken (39bits/s). Languages that are spoken faster have less information density per syllable! One of the coolest results in linguistics. https://t.co/TUCSiELuUp

Deedy

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The Interpreter

newyorker.com

In the Bible’s book of Genesis, monolingual humans aspired to build a "city and tower with its top in the heavens". God punished humans by creating a multitude of languages to sow chaos: "Look, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be... See more

Ruby Justice Thelot • The Balkanization and Babelification of the Internet

they stumbled upon a crucial detail—Indo-European

Carlo Rovelli • Anaximander: And the Birth of Science

Languages change and evolve organically. But it is perhaps paradoxically necessarily that languages must remain mostly unchanging — mostly common between their speakers — such that change can be recognized and contextualized, rather than simply disorienting.