Julia Kupper

When speaking of grammatical genders, one might wonder what grammar has to do with sex. Not much, to be honest. The original meaning of ‘gender’ was ‘race’, ‘type’ or ‘kind’. As a matter of fact, ‘gender’ has the same origin as ‘genre’ and ‘genus’. But then, the Greek philosophers decided to complicate things once again and started using the noun genos (‘type’ or ‘race’) to refer to one specific division of things into three types: males (humans and animals), females and inanimate objects. From Greek, this passed on to Latin and consequently to other European languages, including Old English...

Old English is an early form of the English language and dates from the mid-5th to late 11th century A.D. It was written and spoken by the Anglo-Saxons in modern-day England and the eastern and southern parts of Scotland. Old English is part of the West Germanic branch of the Germanic languages, a sub-group of the Indo-European language family...

Punctuation marks structure and organise written language, but also indicate pauses and intonation when reading aloud. The origin of punctuation lies in classical rhetoric, the art of oratory. When a speech was prepared in ancient Rome and Greece, marks were used to indicate where and for how long a speaker should pause. These pauses were named after the sections they divided...

Swear words have existed in the English language since the days of our forebears – and their forebears, too. We would have a much better understanding of their etymology if people had not been too afraid to write them down, but back in the days they were used far more in common speech than in easily traceable written forms. Many editors refused to include them in their dictionaries, but luckily, the evidence for most swear words comes from records of court proceedings, where people’s spoken language was recorded verbatim..

The Festival De Cannes (Cannes Film Festival) will start in less than one week and we thought it would be interesting to conduct some research into the best constructed film languages. We have based our findings on the syntactical (system for creating sentences), phonological (sound system) and grammatical (structural rules) complexity of each language. But first things first…

The question of where language comes from has been an interesting, yet controversial issue for many centuries. There are two dominant theories on how different languages lead their speakers to contrasting thoughts and perceptions:
Noam Chomsky, the renowned linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, logician and professor, proposed the theory that all languages share the same universal grammar, the same underlying concepts, the same degree of systematic complexity...

magine being the last person of your people to speak your language. With no possibility to pass on the wisdom of your ancestors, the cultural heritage, your way of expressing your love, your humour, your life.
According to the UNESCO, it is estimated that, if nothing is done, half of our over 6000 languages spoken today will die out by the end of this century...

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is without a doubt one of the greatest writers of the English language. He has written some great poems and over 39 surviving plays over a period of only twenty years. The language in which Shakespeare wrote is referred to as Early Modern English, a linguistic period that lasted from approximately 1500 to 1750. The language spoken during this period is often referred to as Elizabethan English or Shakespearian English...

The Oxford comma is an optional comma that is also known as the serial or Harvard comma. It clarifies meaning when it is placed before conjunctions, such as or & and in a series of three or more terms in a sentence.
The Oxford comma got its name from the Oxford University Press where printers, editors and readers traditionally used it. It is somehow ironic that the PR department at Oxford University no longer uses the serial comma...

“The Web of today is about documents, the Semantic Web is about things and how these things are related to each other”
But what exactly does this mean?
So far, computers only recognise how you say things (i.e. the syntax) but not the meaning of the words (i.e. the semantics). When you use a search engine, thousands of documents are scanned which contain the words or phrases that you look for; this word-matching process is a rather low level search...

Have you ever wondered why there are three different concepts for one word in the English language, for instance weird, odd and strange? This is because native and foreign terms co-exist in English: weird derives from Old English, odd from Old Norse and strange from Old French...

I secretly recorded a conversation between all of my flat(room)mates and myself. Why would she do that, you might wonder. On the one hand, I wanted to make explicit what is normally taken for granted: What are distinctive features of spoken language? On the other hand, I was very interested to identify who really dominates conversations and is the most active speaker in our house, i.e. the person who does most of the interruptions, introduces new topics, has the most number of turns, etc...

They created the most viral animated videos of all time; then, they launched the major web series “Farmed and Dangerous.” Now, Chipotle is doing the impossible: bridging the gap between burritos and America’s finest contemporary writers. Wait, what? Who was the mastermind behind this unexpected partnership? None other than Jonathan Safran Foer, who came up with the idea when he was stranded at a Chipotle without a book to read.

As a talent manager here at Contently, I collaborate with many talented writers, infographics designers, and photographers on a daily basis. For those who have heard a little about Contently but don’t work with our clients, I always get the same question: “What’s it like?”

You see them everywhere; you probably know one, and you might even be confused about whether or not you are one. Our generation’s subculture of “hipsterdom” is pretty flimsy in comparison to other post-war styles, such as the hippie, punk or grunge movements. Besides displacing hard-working families and old-times residents, the urban-based hipsters haven’t accomplished much in the way of rebellion over the last decade. So it comes as no surprise that people have started to dislike this kale-eating, grandma’s-sweater-wearing kind. And brands are no exception.