The linguistic miracle of texting: John McWhorter at TED2013More than 22 million text messages are sent across the world every day … many in truly terrible English. It’s the end of the world as we know it, many decry. The decline and fall of written language means the end for us all, right? Not so fast. Linguist John McWhorter has a great new […]
Voter suppression, pandemics, fish, curing Alzheimer’s: Session 2 of TED U at TED2013TED’s Bruno Giussani is back on the TED stage to invite up this morning’s cadre of audience talks. No long preamble … we’re straight into it: Jason Pontin, editor and publisher of MIT Technology Review, wants us to think about why we can’t (or think we can’t) solve big problems anymore — what is our generation’s […]
5 examples of how the languages we speak can affect the way we thinkEconomist Keith Chen starts today’s talk with an observation: to say, “This is my uncle,” in Chinese, you have no choice but to encode more information about said uncle. The language requires that you denote the side the uncle is on, whether he’s related by marriage or birth and, if it’s your father’s brother, whether […]
