Category: Language

  • Improving the Information Society Through Awareness of Languages, by Alan N. Shapiro

    On January 24, 2012, I was a keynote speaker at the BOBCATSSS conference on Information Management of the organization of European university libraries in Amsterdam. On the occasion of its 20th anniversary, BOBCATSSS 2012 was organised by students from three universities of applied sciences.

  • A Critique of the Idea of Neutral Language, by Marc Silver

    In Arguing the Case, Marc Silver shifts the ground in original ways. He is not content to “deconstruct” the discourse founding the disciplines he studies – political, legal, scientific, literary, and psychoanalytic. He reveals the rhetorical, logical and philosophical rules as well as the paradoxes and aporias, which sustain the disciplines he illuminates.

  • The Klingon Language

    At the same time that many of the world’s languages are either out- right disappearing or imploding into deeper uncertainty and complexity, there is one new language which is currently experiencing rapid exponential growth in its number of speakers, and is the object of widespread fascination.

  • The Fate of Languages

    There are about six thousand living human languages spoken in the world today. Estimates by language catalogers of the number of existing languages vary by about 10%, since it depends upon how one defines what distinguishes a language from a dialect. The vast majority of Earth languages are in danger of imminent disappearance.

  • Richard Rorty on Radicalism, Liberalism, and Poetic Language

    I was very impressed reading something that Richard Rorty wrote about revolutionaries in his essay “The Contingency of Community” ( in the book “Contingency, irony, and solidarity”). Rorty argues very cogently for a kind of “impossible” deconstructive synthesis of radicalism and liberalism.