Writing is technology. Like the mating displays of birds-of-paradise and the pheromone trails of ants, it is a form of communication. However, unlike communication systems governed by genetic ...

Human languages as disparate as English, Japanese, and Russian follow remarkably similar evolutionary paths, according to a ...

The words "mama", "cookie", and "paper" might seem innocuous and common enough, but they share a linguistic quality that's statistically rare within the world's collective lexicon: They all contain a ...

This created opportunities for the further evolution of the written word. Monks were busy for hundreds of years copying religious texts, but curiously (to us) they didn't bother to put spaces between ...