Language episodes
8 episodes so far
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Free
21 min
Do Animals Talk? What Whales, Bees and Prairie Dogs Reveal About Language
From whale song to bee dance, the hidden languages of the animal kingdom are far stranger and richer than we ever imagined
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18 min
The Weight of a Word: How Legal Language Learned to Say Exactly What It Means
Inside the centuries-long struggle to write sentences that can't be misread, and why even a single comma can cost millions.
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14 min
Body Language: The Silent Conversation Older than Speech
How the silent choreography of human bodies carries meaning that words alone never could
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16 min
The Empire of the Alphabet: Twenty-Two Letters That Spread Across the World
Why a script made for traders outlasted the writing of priests and kings, and which scripts were lost along the way
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16 min
When Valleys Whistle Back: The World's Whistled Languages
In a few remote places, whole conversations travel for miles on pitch and breath alone, and the brain treats them as speech.
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20 min
The Tower of Babel Problem: Seven Thousand Languages and Why They Are Vanishing
An ancestral language, a sky god whose name echoes from Sanskrit to Norse, and children punished for speaking their grandparents' words
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16 min
The Words We Think In: Does Language Shape Thought?
Compass directions instead of left and right, two words for blue, and languages with no numbers
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17 min
Lost in Translation: The Strange Story of Ancient Scripts and the People Who Cracked Them
From the Rosetta Stone to Linear B, the obsessive decipherers who gave silent civilizations their voices back
Hear any of them in full
Every episode is in the Compound app; Compound+ opens the whole library.