Plato's dialogue Cratylus begins with a debate. Socrates is asked whether the sounds of words are simply arbitrary conventions, as Hermogenes suggests, or if sounds are reflective in some way of their ...

Sanskrit is a language reveled for its complexity in many regards. It is grammatically very complex, has a rich phonemic library, and is considered to be one of the oldest documented languages in the ...

This news release is available in German. "It's not that arbitrariness was a bad idea. It is an important principle, but it doesn't fully explain how words work," says Mark Dingemanse, language ...