This recent find in evolution studies is strikingly negative. There is no physical limitation to chimpanzee speech; rather, the limitation is a mental one.
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It’s progress, perhaps, that researchers are defending the role of parsimonious inference. It’s possible to see too much in scattered beads — or too little.
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We can research many questions about language but it’s not realistic to hope either that we can easily explain its origin or simply reduce it to software.
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Can there be such a thing as “the hardest language to learn”? At ZME Science, science writer Tibi Puiu dives into the question, starting with the assumption that the learner is an English speaker: After 70 years of experience teaching languages to American diplomats, the U.S. Foreign Service has grouped foreign languages into four categories of difficulty. The easiest language group requires 575-600 hours of study (23-24 weeks of classroom study) for students to achieve sufficient competence to be posted overseas, whereas the hardest group requires at least 2,200 hours of study (88 weeks of full-time classroom study) to achieve the same level of proficiency. In other words, some languages can be 3-4 times harder to master than others. Tibi Read More ›