And we all know that some words—like “hysterical” “ecstatic,” and “austere,” etc, even manage to look like what they describe, somehow. But what happens when language neither sounds ...

“Proto-World” proposals remain controversial at best. What about mama? It does not sound like a mother, but it does piggyback on another feature of language: the fact that some sounds are more ...

The sounds you make when you read Spanish out loud can sometimes be different to the ones you would make in English. Perfume. Perfume. It’s spelled the same as in English. In Spanish you say all ...