Wild chimpanzees alter the meaning of single calls when embedding them into diverse call combinations, mirroring linguistic operations in human language. Human language, however, allows an infinite ...

When it comes to protest culture at UC Berkeley, I find myself playing the part of a fair-weather friend. I can only engage for so long until my emotions become numb, the chants lose their meaning and ...

Much has been said about the remarkable ability humans have to extract meaning from language. That ability is remarkable indeed. In a split second, we perceive a spoken or written word and immediately ...

New research suggests wild chimpanzees have developed a far more nuanced communication system than previously realized, using several mechanisms that combine their vocalizations to create new meaning.

Some time ago, I fell into conversation with a colleague about what we had been reading lately, and the person suggested that I absolutely must give Henry James’s “The Ambassadors” a try. The pandemic ...

The death of Joan Didion, the most profound essayist about language since George Orwell, comes at a time when one of her most astute observations — that words have meaning and consequences — is being ...

Sanskrit is a language reveled for its complexity in many regards. It is grammatically very complex, has a rich phonemic library, and is considered to be one of the oldest documented languages in the ...