Sublime

Under American women’s influence, he insisted, language risks becoming a ‘generalised mumble or jumble, a tongueless slobber or snarl or whine’; it will sound like ‘the moo of the cow, the bray of the ass, and the bark of the dog’.

Quite aside from the fact that it is impossible to understand a culture without understanding its language, acquiring a new language makes you aware of your own language: your own thoughts. The benefits of becoming fluent in a foreign tongue are as under-estimated as the

Pirate #3: Languager

Sapir and Whorf’s rhetoric answered to a contemporary moral panic about the use and abuse of language. The young 20th century saw public discourse perverted by new forms of propaganda, disseminated by such new technologies as radio and film, all of which accompanied and facilitated the catastrophic upheavals of the First World War and the political

That makes global claims of this sort (claims about our language defining our world) untestable even in principle. It’s not a scientific hypothesis; it’s a rather strange (and in my view implausible) metaphysical claim that no one can ever confirm or refute. That is part of why linguists are so much less intrigued by global Sapir–Whorf-style claims

Languaging is about creating distinctions between old and new, same and different.

My view, which is different from Chomsky’s, is that language is fundamentally a social phenomenon. Its structure does not derive from an internal blueprint, but from the general cognitive abilities of a social species, and external factors which include principles of interaction, the vagaries of history, and certain patterns that tend to emerge in

Does the complexity of a language reflect the culture and society of its speakers, or is it a universal constant determined by human nature?