Language Evolution

How four tools enabled humanity to control its destiny What enabled us to go from simple stone tools to smartphones? How did bands of hunter-gatherers evolve into multinational empires? Listeners of Sapiens will say a cognitive revolution - a dramatic evolutionary change that altered our brains, turning primitive humans into modern ones - caused a cultural explosion. In Transcendence, Gaia Vince argues instead that modern humans are the product of a nuanced coevolution of our genes, environment, and culture that goes back into deep time.

This volume will revise the way we look at the modern populations of Latin America and North America by providing a totally new view of the history of Native-American and African-American peoples throughout the hemisphere. Africans and Native Americans explores key issues relating to the evolution of racial terminology and European colonialists' perceptions of color, analyzing the development of color classification systems and the specific evolution of key terms such as black, mulatto, and mestizo, which no longer carry their original meanings.

What makes us human? Why are we the only animals who wear clothes, drive cars, trawl the internet, and fly helicopters on Mars? It’s all because we’ve learnt to talk, yet remarkably, we still don’t know how we did it. Speech! suggests an answer that’s been hiding in plain sight - the simple yet radical shift that turned our analog grunts and shrieks into words. But, its consequences are far from simple: being able to share ideas through language was an evolutionary tipping point - it allowed us to link up our minds.

Fifty thousand years ago - merely a blip in evolutionary time - our Homo sapiens ancestors were competing for existence with several other human species, just as their precursors had done for millions of years. Yet something about our species distinguished it from the pack, and ultimately led to its survival while the rest became extinct. Just what was it that allowed Homo sapiens to become masters of the planet? Ian Tattersall, curator emeritus at the American Museum of Natural History, takes us deep into the fossil record to uncover what made humans so special.

As language evolves faster than ever before, what is the future of 'correct' style? With wry cleverness and an uncanny intuition for the possibilities of Internet-age expressiveness, Favilla argues that rather than try to preserve the sanctity of the written language as laid out by Strunk and White, we should be concerned with the larger issues of clarity, flexibility, playfulness and political awareness. Her approach to the new rules - as practical as they are fun - will fascinate and delight believers and naysayers alike.

Warum sind wir Menschen so verschieden? Sind wir nicht merkwürdig, wir Menschen, mit verschiedenartigem Aussehen, anderen Sprachen und unterschiedlichen Religionen? Der Evolutionsbiologe Josef H. Reichholf greift das Thema Evolution anhand der alltäglichen Erfahrungen auf, die junge Menschen z.B. bei ihren Mitschülern machen: Jeder Einzelne ist anders, dazu kommt die äußerliche Verschiedenheit durch Kinder asiatischer oder schwarzafrikanischer Herkunft.

A history and examination of cursing, swearing, whatever you want to effing call it! Is it useful? Is it effective?

In its long history, the English language has had many lawmakers - those who have tried to regulate or otherwise organize the way we speak. The Lexicographer's Dilemma poses a pair of questions: What does proper English mean? And who gets to say what's right? Our ideas of correct or proper English have a history, and today's debates over the state of the language - whether about Ebonics in schools, the unique use of language in a South Park episode, or split infinitives in the Times - make sense only in historical context.

In the 1970s, the behavioral psychologist Herbert S. Terrace led a remarkable experiment to see if a chimpanzee could be taught to use language. A young ape, named “Nim Chimpsky” in a nod to the linguist whose theories Terrace challenged, was raised by a family in New York and instructed in American Sign Language. Initially, Terrace thought that Nim could create sentences but later discovered that Nim’s teachers inadvertently cued his signing. Terrace concluded that Project Nim failed - not because Nim couldn’t create sentences but because he couldn’t even learn words.