I published my first nonfiction writing in the local newspaper when I was eight years old. It wasn’t intentional. My first grade teacher submitted my work to the kiddie page of the paper after I told her I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. Since then, I’ve…
Lexical Distance Among the Languages of Europe
This chart shows the lexical distance — that is, the degree of overall vocabulary divergence — among the major languages of Europe. The size of each circle represents the number of speakers for that language. Circles of the same color belong to the same language group. All the groups except…
Nonlinearity in Language: Chomsky Was Right
The nonlinearity of language is a fact of greater import than any theoretical conclusions it might have supported in 1956.