Dialect expert Erik Singer is back with a short video on some fascinating features of language:

I find anything about language or linguistics immensely fascinating. It’s amazing the way humans so naturally develop the ability to convert random noise into patterns for communication by age 3.

In this video he talks about the Great Vowel Shift, a slow wandering of the pronunciation of English over the past few hundred years. Now stretch this back a thousand more years and think about how many different languages have derived and evolved from the same roots.

I’d like to lobby for Erik to get his own series on Netflix about language — perhaps a collaboration with John McWhorter? The Evolution of Language would be a perfect title. I’ll be here waiting for it.