THE first necessity, the first law, of all language is clearness. Aristotle and common sense tell us this. Clearness is a fundamental requirement in the expression of thought. “ If the foundations be ...

A TikTok video hilariously demonstrates how much of the meaning of language is conveyed separately from its content. In March, Diego J. Rivas began posting TikTok videos of him recreating what ...

Get any of our free daily email newsletters — news headlines, opinion, e-edition, obituaries and more. Some of the liveliest words in any language are onomatopoeias, or terms that imitate sounds. When ...

Of course, plenty of languages share words that have similar sounds because they’re either “descended” from the same original language (such as Spanish “hospital” and French “hopital,” both of which ...