Tag: linguistics
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Cracking the linguistic code
EVERY year since 2008, with a gap for Covid-19, linguist Nicholas Evans has taken a banana boat six hours along the coast of New Guinea to reach a village called Bimadbn. There he spends the next six weeks documenting a previously unwritten language called Nen… This article first appeared in The Observer on 25 October 2025. To…
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The linguist they can’t shut up
NICHOLAS Evans was wading out to a boat moored in the shallow Gulf of Carpentaria, off the northern coast of Australia, when he felt what he thought was a baby shark nipping at his heels. The “nips” were actually bullets hitting the sea on either side of him… This article first appeared in The New World…
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Celtic mystery
SAINT Patrick, whose feast day is celebrated on 17 March, left behind two short works in Latin, but he probably spoke a Celtic language. By the time he was saving Irish souls in the fifth century AD, linguists are pretty sure that Celtic was spoken throughout Britain and Ireland. When Celtic first arrived in those…