Catalan: From Medieval Kingdoms to Modern Europe
Catalan is the language of Catalonia in Spain. It is not a dialect of Spanish. It is a distinct language that stemmed from Vulgar Latin, influenced by French and later also by Spanish. It developed along its own linguistic trajectory. Spoken across four countries in several regional varieties, it has endured through political suppression, institutional revival and a continuing debate over its place beside Spanish.
Weekend Linguistic Challenge: Designing a Symbol Translation Task
What happens when a child is asked to learn a language through meaningless symbols, remember their assigned meaning, and then combine them to “read” a sentence? Except there is a problem: the sentence structure belongs to a different language.
The Voynich Manuscript: An encrypted alchemy codex or a diary written in a lost language?
A beautiful and bizarre 15th century manuscript of uncertain origin, contains more than two hundred pages filled with an unknown script, strange plants, astronomical diagrams, bathing figures, anatomy-like drawings, and what looks like recipes or pharmaceutical instructions. Six centuries later, it remains unread, waiting in Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, catalogued as MS 408 and available for anyone to examine.
Sign Languages: Soundless Visuospatial Systems
Sign language is iconic, physical and often intensely expressive to convey meaning without sound. It is not a visual representation of its homeland’s spoken language. Sign languages are fully developed natural communication systems with their own grammar and cultural context.
The Accent from Nowhere: How “Received Pronunciation” Became the Voice of Britain
You may not know the term Received Pronunciation, but you have almost certainly heard it. Once considered the “correct” way to speak British English, RP implied better education, authority and elite social class. Today, its modern descendant sounds very different from the voice that once ruled public communication and entertainment.
How to Adapt Proverbs Without Changing What You Measure: A PANSS Case Study
When a proverb becomes part of an assessment, it retains its role as a cultural expression, but it also becomes a measurement stimulus. An item designed to generate evidence about a particular aspect of cognitive functioning: abstract thinking.
The Mayan Script: How Linguists Rediscovered the Maya Ancient Civilization
From the reconstruction of the Proto-Mayan language to the decipherment of ancient glyphs, reverse-engineering through modern Mayan languages unlocked one of the richest historical records in the Americas. It revealed people, cities, arts, sciences, and the vibrant culture behind one of history’s most fascinating civilizations.
How Proverbs Connect Language, Culture and Cognition
Proverbs sit at the intersection of language, culture and cognition. They preserve collective memory, vary in the level of abstract reasoning, and reflect the cultural contexts that formed them, offering enduring wisdom as well as insight into past ways of life, values and survival.
The Bird Song: A Language with Grammar
As a high school student, Toshitaka Suzuki bought a pair of binoculars and began watching birds along his long walks through the forests of Karuizawa, a resort town in the mountains near Nagano, Japan. One species, the tiny Shijukara, kept drawing his attention. Years later, observing this bird led to one of the most intriguing discoveries in the study of language.
The Tibetan Language: Preserving Meaning Across Distance, Evolving Dialect, and Generations
A translation can be accurate and still be misunderstood. Tibetan scholars identified this problem centuries ago. On one of the world’s highest plateaus in one of the harshest remote environments on Earth, Tibetans built an extraordinarily sophisticated educational system and a method designed to test understanding across languages and generations. This method may be history’s closest analogue to what we call Linguistic Validation today.
