130 Fun Facts About Linguistics

Roughly how many living languages does Ethnologue catalogue worldwide?

Ethnologue catalogues roughly 7,170 living languages; its 2023 edition listed 7,168, and every edition since 2019 has counted between 7,100 and 7,170.

Ethnologue, the annual catalogue of the world's living languages, is published by which organization?

SIL, formerly the Summer Institute of Linguistics, is a Christian organization headquartered in Dallas whose field linguists and Bible translators feed the database.

Which country, with about 840 known spoken languages, is the most linguistically diverse in the world?

Papua New Guinea, with about 840 living languages for some ten million people, is the most linguistically diverse country; English and Tok Pisin bridge its mostly tiny speech communities.

Which language of the western Pyrenees is the only one in its continent with no known relatives?

Basque is Europe's only living language isolate; its roughly 750,000 speakers live on both sides of the western Pyrenees, and its first printed book, Linguae Vasconum Primitiae, appeared in 1545.

Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian are the three most-spoken members of which language family?

Uralic takes its name from the Ural Mountains, the family's hypothesised homeland; alongside Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian it includes the Sámi languages of northern Scandinavia.

Malagasy, Madagascar's language, belongs to which family, which stretches to Easter Island?

Austronesian reaches from Madagascar to Easter Island; its deepest diversity lies among the Formosan languages of Taiwan, which is why Taiwan is regarded as the family's homeland.

Which language family, second only to Indo-European in speakers, includes Chinese?

Sino-Tibetan, with more than 400 languages, is second only to Indo-European in speakers; its roughly 1.3 billion Sinitic speakers dwarf Burmese (about 33 million) and the Tibetic languages.

Which proposed African language family, with about 1,540 languages, would be the world's largest if valid?

Niger–Congo groups about 1,540 languages and roughly 600 million speakers, third-largest by speakers; its Atlantic–Congo core is famous for elaborate noun-class systems.

Which two major branches of the Indo-European family are extinct?

Eight branches survive: four spoken by hundreds of millions each and four (Hellenic, Albanoid, Armenian and Celtic) by fewer than fifteen million each.

Which extinct Bronze Age language of what is now Turkey is the earliest attested Indo-European language?

Hittite, written in cuneiform on tablets from about 1650 BC, is the earliest attested Indo-European language; isolated Hittite names appear in Old Assyrian merchant tablets from Kanesh centuries earlier.

Which judge told the Asiatic Society in 1786 that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin sprang from a common root?

He was a prodigy who learned Greek, Latin, Persian, Arabic and Hebrew as a boy; his father, also William, introduced the symbol π to mathematics.

According to the prevailing Kurgan hypothesis, the Proto-Indo-European homeland lay in which region?

The Kurgan hypothesis places the homeland on the Pontic–Caspian steppe north of the Black and Caspian Seas, where the ancestral language was probably spoken between about 4500 and 2500 BCE.

Grimm's law describes the consonant shift that produced which branch of Indo-European?

Grimm's law is the First Germanic Sound Shift: inherited p became f in Germanic, so Sanskrit pitā and Greek patḗr correspond to English father.

Which Danish linguist first discovered the sound correspondences later named after Jacob Grimm?

Rasmus Rask set out the correspondences in his 1818 prize essay on the origin of Old Norse; Jacob Grimm systematised them four years later and got the naming rights.

The Great Vowel Shift in English took place primarily between which years?

The Great Vowel Shift spans roughly 1400–1700: it began after Chaucer's death and was largely complete by the 18th century, leaving spellings fixed by early printers out of step with pronunciation.

Which 1957 book by Noam Chomsky is credited with revolutionizing the scientific study of language?

Syntactic Structures (1957) launched generative grammar and contained the sentence 'Colorless green ideas sleep furiously', built to show that a sentence can be grammatical yet meaningless.

Which argument holds that children hear far too little input to learn language from data alone?

The poverty of the stimulus argument holds that children's input underdetermines the grammar they acquire, so innate constraints must limit what a possible human grammar can look like.

How did Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (1916) come to be published?

He died in 1913 and had only taught the course three times; his pupils reconstructed it into the book that founded structural linguistics.

Benjamin Lee Whorf of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis made his living in which profession?

Whorf worked as a fire prevention engineer for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company throughout his career, studying under Edward Sapir on the side and writing a grammar sketch of Hopi.

The International Phonetic Association was formed in 1886 under which linguist?

Paul Passy, a French phonetician, founded the association in Paris in 1886 as a teachers' group promoting phonetic notation; its first standard alphabet was published in 1888.

Two words such as 'tip' and 'dip' that differ in only one sound are called what?

'Tip' and 'dip' form a minimal pair, the standard test that two sounds such as t and d are separate phonemes; sign languages have minimal pairs too, differing in a single parameter such as handshape.

The Wug test, in which children pluralize a made-up creature, was created by which psycholinguist?

Jean Berko Gleason's 1958 paper introduced the Wug test, showing that small children apply the plural rule to words they have never heard, saying 'wugs' with a voiced z.

Paul Broca's 1861 patient 'Tan' had a lesion in which lobe of the brain?

Tan's lesion lay in the left frontal lobe, in the inferior frontal gyrus now called Broca's area; Leborgne died days after Broca examined him, and a 2007 MRI of his preserved brain confirmed the damage.

Damage to which brain region in the superior temporal gyrus produces fluent but meaningless speech?

Wernicke's area, in the posterior superior temporal gyrus, was linked to comprehension by Carl Wernicke in 1874; damage causes fluent but meaningless speech, and the region sits in the left hemisphere in about 95% of right-handers.

How old was Genie, the feral child, when Los Angeles authorities discovered her in 1970?

Genie was 13 when found in 1970, having been kept isolated since infancy; she never fully acquired grammar, and scientists compared her to Victor of Aveyron, the 'wild boy' studied by Itard from 1801.

Nicaraguan Sign Language emerged among deaf schoolchildren in which city from 1977?

The language emerged in Managua after a special-education centre opened there in 1977, bringing about 50 deaf children together; before that, deaf Nicaraguans were isolated and used home signs.

The sign language of the United States is most closely related to that of which country?

France: about 58% of signs used by deaf Americans are cognates of Old French Sign Language, which Laurent Clerc brought to Hartford in 1817; British signing is mutually unintelligible with it.

What term describes a stable contact language that has acquired native speakers?

A creole is a pidgin that has become a community's mother tongue; the children of pidgin-speaking adults expand it into a full language through a process called nativization.

L. L. Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, practised which profession?

Zamenhof was an ophthalmologist practising in Warsaw; growing up in multi-ethnic Białystok, where Russians, Poles, Germans and Jews each spoke their own language, convinced him a neutral tongue was needed.

The Rosetta Stone carries the same decree in hieroglyphic, Greek and which third script?

Demotic, the cursive everyday script of later Egypt, fills the middle register; the priestly decree of 196 BC differs only slightly across all its versions, which made the stone the key to reading Egyptian.

Which philologist is credited with deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs in the 1820s?

Jean-François Champollion announced his decipherment in the 1822 Lettre à M. Dacier; a child prodigy who read Coptic, Greek and Arabic by his teens, he used Coptic to fix the phonetic values of the signs.

Cuneiform, the earliest known writing system, was originally developed to write which language?

Cuneiform was devised in Mesopotamia around 3200 BC to write Sumerian, a language isolate; its wedge-shaped signs (cuneiform means 'wedge-shaped') were later adapted for Akkadian, Elamite and Old Persian.

The Greek alphabet was adapted from the 22-letter consonantal script of which seafaring people?

The Phoenicians' 22-letter consonantal script was borrowed by the Greeks around the 8th century BC; Herodotus credited the prince Cadmus, and the Greeks repurposed spare letters as vowels.

Hangul, the Korean alphabet published in 1446, was created under which king?

Sejong the Great promulgated the alphabet in 1446 as Hunminjeongeum, 'Correct Sounds for the Instruction of the People'; the shapes of its five basic consonants mimic the speech organs.

Sequoyah's Cherokee writing system, completed in 1821, is what type of script?

Sequoyah's script is a syllabary: each of its 85 characters stands for a whole syllable, and within a quarter-century Cherokee literacy reportedly outstripped that of the surrounding settlers.

Which self-taught linguist and architect deciphered Linear B in 1952?

Michael Ventris, an architect with no formal training in philology, showed in 1952 that Linear B recorded an early form of Greek; he died in a car crash in 1956, weeks before Documents in Mycenaean Greek appeared.

The ogham alphabet, carved on stone monuments from about the 4th century AD, mainly wrote which language?

Ogham mainly recorded Primitive or Early Irish on some 400 surviving stones, most of them in Munster; its letter names include trees such as beith (birch) and dair (oak).

Which of Georgian's three historic scripts is the standard for modern Georgian?

Mkhedruli, the 'military' script, became the standard secular and modern Georgian script; Asomtavruli, the oldest script, is attested from the 5th century, and Nuskhuri served church manuscripts.

Which is the most widely spoken tonal language in the world?

Mandarin, with over 900 million native speakers, is the most spoken tonal language; most varieties have four lexical tones plus a neutral tone, while Cantonese distinguishes at least six.

One count found that 10% of the basic vocabulary of which South African Bantu language contains a click?

Xhosa, Nelson Mandela's mother tongue, writes its clicks with the letters c, x and q and is largely mutually intelligible with Zulu.

Taa (ǃXóõ), spoken mainly in Botswana, is notable for holding what linguistic record?

One count gives it at least 87 consonants, 20 vowels and two tones — the most speech sounds of any known language.

Who was the last fluent speaker of Ubykh, the 84-consonant language that died with him on 7 October 1992?

Tevfik Esenç, who recorded the language for the linguist Georges Dumézil, was Ubykh's last fluent speaker; Ubykh had 84 consonants, the most of any language without clicks, and its speakers had fled the Caucasus in the 1860s.

Rotokas, spoken on Bougainville, has one of the world's smallest alphabets. How many letters?

The letters are a, e, g, i, k, o, p, r, s, t, u and v; the Central dialect has only six consonant phonemes.

The Pirahã, whose language reportedly lacks recursion, live along which Brazilian river?

Their language can be whistled, hummed or encoded in music, and by some analyses has as few as ten or eleven phonemes.

Morris Swadesh's glottochronology assumes basic vocabulary is replaced at a constant rate, by analogy with what?

Glottochronology borrows the logic of radioactive decay: Swadesh assumed core vocabulary is replaced at a constant rate, like carbon-14, so shared retention dates a split; most linguists treat the formula as rough at best.

A whistled register of Spanish, inscribed by UNESCO in 2009, is used on which Canary Island?

La Gomera's whistled Spanish, Silbo Gomero, carries messages across the island's ravines; it predates the Spanish settlers and was inscribed by UNESCO as intangible heritage in 2009.

The word 'salary' comes from the Latin salarium, which derives from the word for what?

Salarium comes from sal, the Romans' word for salt; one theory says soldiers were sometimes paid in salt, another that the allowance covered guarding the Via Salaria, the road that carried salt to Rome.

The Aṣṭādhyāyī, an ancient eight-chapter grammar of Sanskrit, is the work of which grammarian?

Pāṇini, who probably lived between the 6th and 4th centuries BC in Gandhāra, composed the Aṣṭādhyāyī, the earliest Sanskrit grammar to survive in full; it has been called one of the intellectual wonders of the ancient world.

What alignment, seen in Dyirbal and Georgian, treats an intransitive subject like a transitive object?

In ergative–absolutive alignment the intransitive subject shares the absolutive case with the object, while the transitive agent takes the ergative; English and German do the opposite, lumping both kinds of subject together.

Under which anthropologist did Edward Sapir study at Columbia?

Franz Boas, the founder of American academic anthropology, supervised Sapir's Columbia doctorate, completed in 1909; Sapir went on to document California's indigenous languages with Alfred Kroeber.

Which branch of linguistics studies how context contributes to meaning?

Pragmatics studies how context shapes meaning — for example how 'It's cold in here' can work as a request to shut a window rather than a report on the temperature.

Which branch of linguistics studies the internal structure of words?

Morphology studies the internal structure of words, such as how 'walked' splits into the root walk plus the past-tense suffix -ed; it sits between phonology and syntax in scale.

Phonetics is traditionally divided into articulatory, acoustic and which third sub-discipline?

Auditory phonetics deals with how speech sounds are perceived.

What is the traditional minimal unit of phonetics, an individual speech sound?

Phonemes, the units of phonology, are abstract categories of phones.

Between which symbols are phonemes conventionally written?

Phonemes go between forward slashes, as in /p/, while square brackets enclose phonetic transcription of actual sounds, as in [pʰ] for the aspirated p of 'pin'.

How many morphemes make up the word 'unbreakable'?

'Unbreakable' has three morphemes — the negative prefix un-, the root break and the adjective-forming suffix -able — each carrying its own meaning.

The plural -s in 'cats' is what kind of morpheme?

Even some roots are bound: Latin reg- ('king') always needs a case ending.

Which philosopher first introduced the distinction between sense and reference?

Gottlob Frege drew the distinction in his 1892 essay 'Über Sinn und Bedeutung', using the morning star and evening star, which share a reference but differ in sense.

Paul Grice's theory of how speakers mean more than they literally say is called what?

Conversational implicature, set out in Grice's 1975 paper 'Logic and Conversation', rests on a cooperative principle and four maxims — quantity, quality, relation and manner.

Which philosopher developed Speech Act Theory in the 1950s?

J. L. Austin developed speech act theory in his 1955 William James Lectures at Harvard, published posthumously in 1962 as How to Do Things with Words.

Who is regarded as the founder of variationist sociolinguistics?

William Labov founded variationist sociolinguistics with studies such as his 1966 survey of post-vocalic r among staff in New York City department stores.

Historical linguistics is also called what kind of linguistics?

Diachronic linguistics studies change across time, as opposed to the synchronic study of a language at one moment; Saussure drew the distinction in his Course in General Linguistics.

Historical linguistics assumes past change worked like present change: what is this idea called?

The uniformitarian principle, borrowed from Lyell's geology, holds that the forces shaping language in the past are the same as those observable today, so present-day variation can explain past change.

Who first used the term 'Indo-European', in 1813?

Thomas Young coined 'Indo-European' in an 1813 Quarterly Review article; a physician and physicist, he also proposed the wave theory of light and made early progress on Egyptian scripts.

Which German linguist's 1816 study of Sanskrit conjugation helped found comparative grammar?

Franz Bopp's 1816 study of the Sanskrit verb system, compared with Greek, Persian and other languages, founded comparative grammar; his full Vergleichende Grammatik appeared between 1833 and 1852.

In which 1822 book did Jacob Grimm set out his famous sound law?

The second edition of Deutsche Grammatik (1822) set out the consonant shift now called Grimm's law, and added the later High German shift as a second stage.

Which Danish linguist explained the exceptions to Grimm's law?

Karl Verner showed in 1875 that the placement of the inherited accent explained why voiceless fricatives sometimes turned voiced, as in Gothic fadar beside Sanskrit pitā.

August Schleicher's 1861 Compendium was an early attempt to reconstruct which language?

Schleicher's Compendium (1861–62) systematically reconstructed Proto-Indo-European forms, and in 1868 he wrote a short fable, 'The Sheep and the Horses', in his reconstructed tongue.

How old was Saussure when he published his Mémoire on the Indo-European vowel system?

Saussure was 21 when the Mémoire appeared in December 1878; its predicted 'sonant coefficients' were confirmed in 1927 by Jerzy Kuryłowicz from cuneiform texts found in Turkey.

In Saussure's model, the linguistic sign unites a sound pattern with what?

The signifier is the sound form; the signified is the concept.

In which city was Ferdinand de Saussure born in 1857?

Saussure was born in Geneva on 26 November 1857 into a prominent Genevan family and taught at the University of Geneva from 1891; his Course was assembled from lectures he gave there.

The International Phonetic Alphabet is based primarily on which script?

It supplements Latin letters with Greek borrowings and invented symbols.

How many segmental letters did the IPA contain after its 2005 addition?

Tone letters and diacritics augment the basic set of 107 letters.

The original IPA was based on the Romic alphabet, a spelling reform by which English phonetician?

Sweet is said to have inspired Shaw's Henry Higgins.

Which Danish linguist coined the term 'Great Vowel Shift'?

Otto Jespersen coined 'Great Vowel Shift' in the first volume (1909) of his Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles.

The Great Vowel Shift altered the pronunciation of which class of Middle English sounds?

The Great Vowel Shift raised or diphthongised Middle English long vowels: the vowel of 'bite', once like modern 'beet', became a diphthong, and 'beet' itself rose from a sound like 'bait'.

In which city was Noam Chomsky born?

Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia on 7 December 1928; his father William, who had emigrated from Ukraine, taught at Gratz College there.

Chomsky's famous 1959 review attacked which behaviourist's account of language?

B. F. Skinner's 1957 book Verbal Behavior was the target; Chomsky's review in the journal Language argued that reinforcement learning could not explain how children acquire grammar.

What term did Chomsky use for a speaker's tacit knowledge of their language?

Competence, in Chomsky's 1965 Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, is the speaker's tacit knowledge of the language; performance is its actual use, with slips and memory limits.

Chomsky is an institute professor emeritus at which university?

Chomsky joined MIT in 1955 and spent over sixty years there, becoming Institute Professor in 1976; in 2017 he also became a laureate professor at the University of Arizona.

Which classification ranks regular, context-free, context-sensitive and unrestricted grammars?

The Chomsky hierarchy (1956) ranks grammars in four nested levels — regular, context-free, context-sensitive and unrestricted — each needing a more powerful automaton to recognise it.

Which French officer found the Rosetta Stone in July 1799?

Pierre-François Bouchard, an engineer officer, spotted the stone on 15 July 1799 while his men were strengthening Fort Julien during Napoleon's Egyptian campaign.

The Rosetta Stone is a stele of which rock?

The stone is granodiorite, a dark grey granitic rock with a pink vein; it was long misdescribed as black basalt, partly because of a dark protective coating removed in 1999.

The Rosetta Stone's decree of 196 BC was issued on behalf of which king?

It was issued during the Ptolemaic dynasty.

The Rosetta Stone was found at Fort Julien near which Nile Delta town?

Rashid is Rosetta in European usage.

In which year did Zamenhof publish the first Esperanto grammar, the Unua Libro?

The Unua Libro appeared in Warsaw in July 1887 under the title 'International Language', in Russian first, with Polish, French and German editions following the same year.

Under what pseudonym did Zamenhof publish his first book on the language?

Doktoro Esperanto, 'Doctor Hopeful', was the pen name on the Unua Libro; enthusiasts soon applied the word Esperanto to the language itself.

Esperanto largely displaced which earlier constructed language among auxiliary-language enthusiasts?

Volapük, created by the German priest Johann Martin Schleyer in 1879, had hundreds of clubs by 1889, but most of its followers defected to the simpler Esperanto within a decade.

What kind of service is Pasporta Servo, run for Esperanto speakers since 1974?

Pasporta Servo is a free-accommodation network: its directory lists Esperanto-speaking hosts who put up travellers without charge, provided the guests speak Esperanto; it began in 1974.

The name of the Melanesian language Tok Pisin derives from which English words?

Tok Pisin is 'talk pidgin': tok from English talk and pisin from pidgin, itself a Chinese-port rendering of 'business'; it is an official language of its home country alongside English and Hiri Motu.

The word 'creole' descends from the verb criar, which means what?

Criar means 'to breed or raise': a crioulo was originally a slave or colonist raised in the household, and the word ultimately descends from the Roman verb creare, 'to create'.

The Greek root étymon, behind the word 'etymology', means what?

Étymon means 'true sense', from étymos, 'true'; Greek grammarians sought a word's original, true meaning, and -logia, 'study of', completes the term.

Whose encyclopedic Etymologiae remained in use in Europe until the 16th century?

Isidore of Seville, archbishop from about 600 to 636, compiled the Etymologiae in 20 books; it was printed at least ten times between 1470 and 1530, though its derivations are often fanciful.

What is a writing system whose letters generally represent only consonants called?

An abjad, a term coined by Peter T. Daniels from the first Arabic letters a-b-j-d, writes consonants only; Arabic and Syriac are classic examples.

Writing that reverses direction at the end of each line is called what?

Boustrophedon, Greek for 'as the ox turns' when ploughing, alternates direction line by line; archaic Greek inscriptions of the 7th and 6th centuries BC often use it.

Which of these is a language isolate of Japan?

Ainu, spoken historically in Hokkaido, Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, has no demonstrated relatives; only a handful of native speakers remained by the 21st century.

According to the UN, how often is a language lost?

UNESCO's estimate is that a language dies every two weeks; with around 40 percent of the world's languages endangered, many with fewer than 1,000 speakers, most have no written form.

Which language was revived from liturgical use into a national tongue with millions of native speakers?

Hebrew had survived only as a liturgical and literary language for some 1,700 years before Eliezer Ben-Yehuda's generation made it the everyday tongue of Jewish Palestine from the 1880s.

Damin, the only non-African language with click consonants, was a ritual code from which continent?

Damin was an initiates' register of Lardil on Mornington Island, Australia, in the Gulf of Carpentaria; its last fluent speakers died in the late 20th century.

The English disapproving 'tut-tut' or 'tsk tsk' is which type of click?

Tut-tut is a dental click, written ǀ in the IPA and made with the tongue tip behind the teeth; the 'tchick' used to spur on a horse is a lateral click.

Edward Sapir ended his career as professor of anthropology at which university?

Sapir moved from Chicago to Yale in 1931 as Sterling Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics and stayed until his death in 1939; Benjamin Lee Whorf studied under him there.

How many functions of communication did Roman Jakobson distinguish?

Jakobson distinguished six functions in his 1960 essay 'Linguistics and Poetics' — referential, emotive, conative, phatic, metalingual and poetic — extending Karl Bühler's Organon model.

Jakobson left Moscow in 1920 for which city, where he helped found a famous linguistic circle?

Jakobson arrived in Prague in 1920 attached to the Soviet diplomatic mission and in 1926 co-founded the Prague Linguistic Circle with Vilém Mathesius and Nikolai Trubetzkoy.

Which linguist worked closely with Genie and insisted she could not have been intellectually disabled?

Susan Curtiss, then a UCLA graduate student, studied Genie from 1971 and published Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day 'Wild Child' in 1977, arguing her deficits stemmed from isolation, not disability.

At roughly what age do hearing infants begin canonical babbling such as 'bababa'?

Canonical babbling — repeated consonant-vowel syllables like 'bababa' — typically begins around 7 months, between 6 and 10 months in nearly all hearing infants; its delay is an early sign of hearing loss.

Nim Chimpsky was the subject of an attempt to teach a chimpanzee what?

Nim was taught American Sign Language at Columbia under Herbert Terrace from 1973; Terrace concluded in 1979 that Nim mostly imitated his trainers rather than forming sentences.

Which German loanword names pleasure taken in another person's misfortune?

Schadenfreude combines Schaden, 'harm', and Freude, 'joy'; English has used it since the mid-19th century, while Weltschmerz ('world-pain') and Zeitgeist are other German imports.

The word 'tea', borrowed by languages worldwide, originated in which Chinese variety?

Hokkien tê, carried by Dutch traders from Fujian and Taiwan, gave English 'tea', French thé and German Tee, while the northern Chinese form chá spread overland as chai.

A word borrowed by translating it piece by piece, rather than adopting its form, is called what?

A calque, or loan translation, renders each part of the foreign word: French gratte-ciel copies 'skyscraper' piece by piece, and English 'flea market' calques French marché aux puces.

The term 'cognate' comes from a Latin word meaning what?

Cognatus means 'blood relative', from co- and gnatus, 'born'; English night, German Nacht and Sanskrit nákt- are cognates, descending from a single ancestral word.

The word 'onomatopoeia' comes from a Greek compound meaning what?

Onomatopoeia is Greek 'name-making', from onoma ('name') and poiein ('to make'); a clock goes tick tock in English but kachi kachi in Japanese.

Which English poet introduced the word 'palindrome' in 1638?

Henry Peacham introduced 'palindrome' in The Truth of Our Times (1638); the Greeks themselves called such lines karkinikoí, 'crab-like', for running backwards.

The longest palindrome in English, 'tattarrattat', was coined by which author?

James Joyce coined 'tattarrattat' for a knock on the door in Ulysses (1922); the Oxford English Dictionary lists it as the longest palindromic word, though Finnish boasts the 19-letter saippuakivikauppias.

The earliest known palindromes appear in which 1st-century Latin acrostic?

The Sator Square, scratched on a Pompeii wall before AD 79, reads SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS the same in four directions, holding both word and sentence palindromes.

The catch in the middle of 'uh-oh' is an example of which consonant?

The catch is a glottal stop, ʔ in the IPA, made by briefly closing the vocal folds; many Cockney and Estuary speakers use it for the t in 'butter'.

In Hawaiian, the ʔ sound is written with a rotated apostrophe called what?

The ʻokina marks the ʔ sound in Hawaiian, which is why the state's name is written Hawaiʻi; the kahakō, a macron, marks vowel length instead.

In which year was Ethnologue first issued?

Ethnologue began in 1951 as a ten-page mimeographed list compiled by Richard S. Pittman to guide Bible translation among minority languages.

How many meanings were on Morris Swadesh's first version of his list?

Swadesh's first list, published in 1950, had 215 meanings; he trimmed it to 200 in 1952 and to 100 in 1955, judging the shorter list more reliable.

Which 2016 film takes the Whorf hypothesis as its premise?

Arrival (2016), directed by Denis Villeneuve, adapts Ted Chiang's 'Story of Your Life'; learning the aliens' circular script reshapes the linguist Louise Banks's perception of time.

Which invented language in Orwell's 1984 shrinks vocabulary to shrink thought?

Newspeak, designed to make thoughtcrime impossible by eliminating the words for it, is Orwell's fictional test of linguistic relativity; the novel's appendix explains its shrinking vocabulary.

Which 19th-century German thinker, with Herder, first explicitly framed linguistic relativity?

Wilhelm von Humboldt, with Herder, held that each language embodies a distinctive worldview — the expression of a nation's spirit — an idea later developed as linguistic relativity.

Which linguist and former missionary is the leading authority on the Pirahã language?

Daniel Everett, who went to the Pirahã as a missionary in 1977 and lost his faith among them, wrote Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes (2008); he reports most speakers know only a few words of Portuguese.

What is the standardised form of Euskara developed in the late 1960s called?

Euskara Batua ('unified Euskara') was launched by the Euskaltzaindia, the language academy, at its 1968 Arantzazu congress, drawing mainly on the central Gipuzkoan dialect.

Which ancient language, known from Roman-era names in Gaul and Navarre, is the ancestor of Euskara?

Aquitanian is known from some 400 personal and divine names in Roman-era inscriptions of the 1st to 3rd centuries AD; many match modern Euskara words, such as Cison beside gizon, 'man'.

Roughly how many rules does the Aṣṭādhyāyī, the classical Sanskrit grammar, contain?

The Aṣṭādhyāyī packs about 3,959 sūtras into eight chapters, using a compressed metalanguage; its classification of sounds and of word classes such as nouns and verbs was the first known of its kind.

Which Persian scholar's 8th-century Al-Kitāb was the first to distinguish sounds from phonemes?

Sibawayh, a Persian from Shiraz who worked in Basra and died about 796, produced Al-Kitāb, a detailed description of Arabic grammar and phonetics that treated sounds and their abstract categories separately.

Which hypothetical macrofamily, proposed by Holger Pedersen in 1903, links Indo-European with Kartvelian and Dravidian?

Nostratic, named by Holger Pedersen in 1903 from nostras, 'our countryman', remains unaccepted by most linguists; a practical limit of about 10,000 years is usually assumed for reconstructing proto-languages.

The relation by which the article 'the' is followed by a noun belongs to which plane of analysis?

Syntagmatic relations hold between elements combined in sequence, such as 'the' plus a following noun; the paradigmatic plane, by contrast, concerns items that could substitute for one another in the same slot.

Kavi, subject of a foundational 1836 study of language structure, was the literary language of where?

Kavi, or Old Javanese, was the literary language of Java; the 1836–39 study's famous introduction, On the Diversity of Human Language Construction, argued that language shapes a people's mental development.

What is the discipline that studies the evolution of written scripts called?

Palaeography, from Greek palaiós ('old') and gráphein ('to write'), traces how scripts such as Carolingian minuscule and Gothic evolved, and is used to date manuscripts by their letterforms.