nouns – WANDERLUST

“Take an adjective (implacable) or a verb (calibrate) or even another noun (crony) and add a suffix like ity, tion or ism. You’ve created a new noun: implacability, calibration, cronyism. Sounds impressive, right?

Nouns formed from other parts of speech are called nominalizations. Academics love them; so do lawyers, bureaucrats and business writers. I call them “zombie nouns” because they cannibalize active verbs, suck the lifeblood from adjectives and substitute abstract entities for human beings.”

Excerpt of an article written by HELEN SWORD, NYT. Continue HERE

There’s no language gene.

There’s no innate language organ or module in the human brain dedicated to the production of grammatical language.

There are no meaningful human universals when it comes to how people construct sentences to communicate with each other. Across the languages of the world (estimated to number 6,000-8,000), nouns, verbs, and objects are arranged in sentences in different ways as people express their thoughts. The powerful force behind this variability is culture.

So goes the argument in Language: The Cultural Tool, the new book I’m reading by Daniel Everett. Next week, I’ll have more to say about the book itself; this week, I want to explore how Everett’s years of living among the Pirahã Indians of Amazonian Brazil helped shape his conclusions — and why those conclusions matter.

The Pirahã are hunter-gatherers who live along the Maici River in Brazil’s Amazon region. They fish, gather manioc and hunt in the forest. As is true with any human society, Pirahã communities are socially complex.

Excerpt of an article written by Barbara J King, NPR. Continue HERE