Fig. 1. Still from Ted Ed’s website.   In this TED Ed video, Mia Nacamulli explains that being bilingual means you know two languages, while multilingual means you know more than two.  However, being bilingual isn’t just an external show of knowledge, bilinguals are also different internally – especially in the brain.  Nacamulli states that the brain of bilingual people actually looks and works differently than the brains of those who are monolingual (or who just know one language).   acamulli explains that language ability is measured in two parts: active and passive. In the active part, the tasks of speaking and writing happen, while in the passive parts, listening and reading take place. While a balanced bilingual has an almost equal ability in two languages, most bilinguals use their language in various degrees. This is determined by the age in which they were exposed to a second language. Nacamulli states there are three classi...

Fig. 1. Still from A Way with Words website.   This podcast episode of A Way With Words begins with a discussion about a fascinating group of compound words. Normally, compound words consist of two words that make up one idea or thing, such as houseboat and steamboat which are both a type of boat. However, there are some compound words whose definition comes from describing what they do, not by what the two words mean together.  For example, scarecrow is not a type of crow, nor is pickpocket a type of pocket.   enturies ago, it was in fashion to create a word by combining two words and making up a whole new word, and around 1200 new words were created. They are called Cutthroat Compounds, but some of the created words have fallen out of common use. These compound words are aptly named for the word cutthroat as it is not a type of throat. Some examples of Cutthroat Compounds are: saddle-goose – silly person scrapegut – violinist tanglelegs – a ...

Fig. 1. Still from Langfocus YouTube Channel.       Paul from the Langfocus Youtube Channel, states Shakespeare, one of the most known writers of all time, wrote thirty-eight plays and 150 poems. However, they’re not so easy to understand because they were written in Early Modern English during the years 1590-1613. Shakespeare not only made an impact on culture, but more importantly on today’s English language – an extensive one at that.      aul continues that it has commonly been asserted that Shakespeare “created” 1700 words that are used in Modern English. However, Paul states there needs to be a reassessment of that claim because although the words do appear in writing for the first time in Shakespeare’s works, that didn’t necessarily mean Shakespeare wrote them since these words might have been in widespread use colloquially. Additionally, some of the 1700 “created” words also appeared in earlier, more obscure literatur...

Figure 1. Still from Unravel Magazine .   The Speech Accent Archive is a project which was started by Steven Weinberger, a linguist professor at Georgia Mason University in Virginia. The purpose of which is to compare accents – and currently has recordings of individuals of 175 different countries and 381 languages.      So why study accents? Weinberger states that one of our basic abilities is to listen to each other, and it’s one of the first things we pay attention to when meeting someone for the first time. Weinberger relates that people make assumptions  about others as soon as they speak. Once someone says hello, the listener can tell the person isn’t a local based on their unique way of pronouncing certain words in English – or their accent.     einberger says that by collecting the accents of several people around the world, he hopes to, “become more understanding of different kinds of variety of lan...

Fig. 1. Still from The World in Words.   Where does language come from? How did humans learn to speak?   To find the answers, the hosts of The World in Words podcast looked into the structure of our throats. They discovered with the help of Philip Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist at Brown University, that we are the only animals on Earth who, “have a common pathway for food, liquid, and air, which allows us basically to choke to death.” In essence, the composition of our throats don’t allow us to breathe and swallow at the same time.      It is because of the setup in our throat, consisting of the larynx and esophagus, that gives us the ability to make sounds and utter words. Because we developed a throat that can lead to our demise though, scientists believed there had to be something beneficial about the configuration of the throat that outweighed the dangers choking held. That something had to be speech. ...