A new article describes an experiment that illustrates how the classical method for the reconstruction of unattested languages can also be used to predict hitherto undocumented words in poorly ...

Of course, it's impossible to provide an exact number of words in English, since new words are being added to the dictionary, and falling out of use, pretty much constantly. But what's an approximate ...

Randy J. LaPolla is in the School of Humanities, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639818, Singapore. Historical linguists seek to determine the relationships between languages, and usually ...

Guillaume Thierry has received funding from the European Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council, the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Biotechnology ...

In 1884 the anthropologist Franz Boas returned from Baffin Island with a discovery that would kick off decades of linguistic wrangling: by his count, the local Inuit language had four words for snow, ...