For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about the intriguing ways we form and expand our vocabularies across different languages.
Imagine you’re in a foreign country, trying to pick up a few words of the local language. You learn that a bolu is a vegetable, a leki is a fox, but a small fox is a lekiki. So what would be the word for a small vegetable? Depending on the patterns you notice in your limited vocabulary, you might guess that the right word is boluki or bolulu. Janet Pierrehumbert, currently a professor of language modeling at Oxford University, is fascinated by the kind of patterns we notice and apply when learning and forming new words — whether in an artificial language like in the example above, or in any of the more than 6,500 known human languages.
“People have made a big deal of the human ability to make complex sentences,” Pierrehumbert says, “but really just as impressive are the enormous vocabularies of human languages. People can make and understand new words all the time. Even five-year-olds with relatively modest amounts of language experience acquire this kind of fantastic ability to make new complex words.”