the.com/linguistics
the science proving your grammar pet peeves are just opinions wearing a lab coat
means The scientific study of language—its sounds, structures, meanings, and how it changes and varies across speakers and time.
from From Latin lingua, "tongue" (which also meant "language"), via French linguistique. The same lingua gives us "language," "linguine" (little tongues of pasta), and "bilingual." The "-istics" tail marks it as a field of systematic study, like "statistics" or "mathematics." The word for the discipline is a relatively modern coinage, arriving in English in the 19th century as the study of language matured into a proper science.
- language count
- around 7,000 exist, one dies every two weeks
- universal grammar
- all human languages share deep structural rules
- no primitives
- every language is equally complex and expressive
- click sounds
- some African languages use clicks as consonants
- sign languages
- fully grammatical, not just gestured speech
tower of babel — biblical account of humans building a tower in ancient mesopotamia, where god confused their languages
rosetta stone — 1799 egyptian artifact with greek, demotic, and hieroglyphic scripts that decoded ancient egyptian language
indo-european language family — reconstructed proto-language spoken ~4500 bce that spawned english, spanish, hindi, russian, and most european languages