Latest Word order Stories

The original "proto-human language" that many linguists believe all modern languages evolved from might have closely resembled the out-of-order speech pattern of the Star Wars character Yoda, claims a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study, which was the work of Santa Fe Institute Program on the Evolution of Human Languages co-directors Merritt Ruhlen and Murray Gell-Mann, discovered that the original tongue used in East Africa some...

A new study from the University of Rochester finds that there is no single advanced area of the human brain that gives it language capabilities above and beyond those of any other animal species.Instead, humans rely on several regions of the brain, each designed to accomplish different primitive tasks, in order to make sense of a sentence. Depending on the type of grammar used in forming a given sentence, the brain will activate a certain set of regions to process it, like a carpenter digging...