linguist

There’s a good line attributed to linguist and activist Noam Chomsky that if Americans loved politics as much as they love sports, there would be a revolution tomorrow.

His Kenyan counterpart, computational linguist Lilian Wanzare, says recording the speech on the continent meant creating data aimed at reflecting how people really live and speak.

“Cleavage is a wonderful word. It’s what linguists call a contronym because its definition contains its own opposite. It means division, but it also means coming together. It also means the space between things.”

But it’s clear that the phenomenon is not just the tweedy concern of linguists.

For over a century, experts - linguists, scientists and archaeologists - have tried to crack the Indus script.