All tagged Linguistics

A Brief Introduction to Tamil and the Dravidian Languages

A Brief Introduction to Tamil and the Dravidian Languages

Savannah Hinson Rivas
Science & Nature

What is a language if not a living, expanding, reflective collection of moods, literature, poems, and the human capacity for sharing knowledge across stars made of verbs and nouns? In his groundbreaking Tamil: A Biography, David Shulman asserts that Tamil is more than a jumble of grammar: We can, nevertheless, agree that the Tamil language and its particular themes, images, and traditions informed and in many ways shaped an extraordinarily long-lived, heterogeneous, and richly elaborated culture or series of cultures along with the political and social orders that emerged out of those cultural matrices

Making Sense of Theories of Language Origins

Making Sense of Theories of Language Origins

Savannah Hinson Rivas
Science & Nature

From sonnets to speeches to heart-quivering soliloquies, language is endowed with the ability to inspire, infuriate, assimilate, separate, or define the elusive human condition. Language is so much a part of our existence that its presence can slip under the beams of our attention, but its structure, its acquisition, and its origins have been the subject of intense debate among linguists for innumerable generations. Here, we will excavate this final question of language – its origins. This is because the machine that is language, and how it made itself indispensable to humanity has spanned various scientific disciplines, from linguistics to genetics.