Tag: Language

  • Nation & World

    In search of grammatical architecture behind words

    When not in a classroom or laboratory, Maria Polinsky spends time doing fieldwork off the southeast coast of Africa, in Madagascar. She studies Malagasy, a melting-pot language whose influences start in Borneo and now borrow from Swahili, Arabic, and French.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Germanic Languages and Literatures names 2006-07 prize winners

    The Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures recently announced its 2006–07 award winners. Prizes to undergraduate and graduate students total $9,000.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Looking for language’s universal logic

    To Gennaro Chierchia, language’s innumerable combinations and subtle changes of structure and meaning are a window onto the human mind.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Harvard researchers head south to preserve ancient inscriptions

    Researchers from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology are preparing to head into the Central American rain forest to begin an ambitious, multiyear project to scan and digitize fading Maya inscriptions and carvings.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Can science, religion coexist in peace?

    Almost 14 billion years after the big bang, and 3.5 billion years since the first bacteria appeared on Earth, humans occupy just one branch of the tree of life. We share an evolutionary limb with other eukaryotes, creatures whose membrane-bound cells carry genetic material. Our biological neighbors developed over time just as we did, by…

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Classicist, medievalist Bloch dies at 95

    Herbert Bloch, Pope Professor of the Latin Language and Literature Emeritus, died on Sept. 6 in Cambridge, Mass. Bloch was born in Berlin on Aug. 18, 1911. He studied ancient history, classical philology, and archaeology at the University of Berlin (1930-1933), which he left for Rome. Owing to the vicissitudes of fate, his brother Egon…

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    The first word on nouns and verbs

    Since humans learned to speak, they have put their words into two basic categories, nouns and verbs. Nouns denote objects; verbs refer to actions. Dictionaries of specialized words have been added by bankers, lawyers, scientists, and clergy, but this core distinction remains.

    4 minutes