May. 14, 2021 , 4:25 PM
One of the hardest questions for evolutionary linguists is why humans speak at all. When people don’t share a language, they quickly resort to using their hands, rather than their voices: It’s easier to mime “drink” than it is to make a noise that sounds like drinking. Those gestures, over time, can easily blossom into full-fledged sign languages. “If gesture is good enough for language,” says Aleksandra Ćwiek, a linguistics Ph.D. student at the Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics, “why the hell do we talk?”
In a new study, Ćwiek and her colleagues help answer that question: People from very different cultures can understand nonlinguistic vocal clues better than expected by chance, they find. Speakers of 28 languages could all successfully guess meanings in a charadeslike game where other people expressed words like “water” using vocal sounds but no language.
Hundreds of students in Brussels have turned to a campus food bank as they struggle to get through the coronavirus pandemic.
Last year, as Belgium went into lockdown and many people lost their jobs, an NGO teamed up with the Free University of Brussels to distribute food to students in need.
The project, called Frigo Partage, collects food from supermarkets that can t be sold, and distributes them twice a week at midday.
An average of 70 students come to collect their supplies each time the food bank is open.
Saturday marks a year since Belgian universities shut down and moved to remote learning - something students say has taken a major toll on their mental health.