A century from now, expect fewer but simpler languages on every continent It isn’t an accident that the Bible’s tale of the Tower of Babel presents multilingualism as a divine curse meant to hinder our understanding.In 1880 a Bavarian priest created a language that he hoped the whole world could use. He mixed words from […]
LAST week’s Johnson column celebrated “National Grammar Day” with some thorny grammatical issues: the uses of which versus that, the plural of words borrowed from foreign languages and how to handle one of those things that drive(s) me crazy. All defy attempts to impose hard-and-fast rules, because perfectly good grammar (as practised by the best English writers) points in more […]
That’s lousy luck for scientists in most of the world. A laboratory assistant works with a microscope at the Ngoma Health Center on Feb. 5, 2014, in Ngoma, Rwanda. I learned English as a second language. Becoming an Anglophone turned out to be a crucial advantage in a brief scientific career years later. (I once […]
