New Research Rethinks the Design of Letters

For centuries, scholars believed that there was no inherent visual correlation between certain signifiers (letters and words) and the signified (what they conveyed). For example, this belief—helmed by Swiss linguist and philosopher Ferdinand de Saussure—suggests that there is no reason why the word tree corresponds to an actual tree, because there’s nothing particularly tree-like about the word tree. New research, however, is making scholars believe …

Tracing the Evolution of Language

Michael Gavin, associate professor of human dimensions of natural resources at Colorado State University, and other researchers across six disciplines formed a unit (in 2010) with the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and they’re on a mission to better understand why our species, collectively, speaks over 7,000 distinct languages. They began by reviewing existing studies (language studies around the equator and …