1 . Researchers say they have translated the meaning of gestures hat wild chimpanzees (黑猩猩) use to communicate. The say wild chimps communicate 19 specific messages to one another with a vocabulary of 66 gestures The scientists discover this by following and filming groups of chimps in Uganda and, and examining more than 5,000 incidents of these meaningful exchanges.

Dr Catherine Hobaiter, who led the research, said that this was the only form of intentional communication to be recorded in the animal kingdom. Only humans and chimps, she said, had a system of communication where they deliberately sent a message to another group member.

“That’s what’s so amazing about chimp gestures,” she said. “They’re the only thing that looks like human language in that respect.”

Although previous research has shown that apes and monkeys can understand complex information from another animal’s call, the animals do not appear to use their voices intentionally to communicate messages. This was a significant difference between calls and gestures, Dr Hobaiter said.

Chimps will check to see if they have the attention of the animal with which they wish to communicate. In one case, a mother presents her foot to her crying baby, signalling: “Climb on me.” The youngster immediately jumps on to its mother’s back and they travel off together. “The big message from this study is that there is another species (物种) out there that is meaningful in its communication, so that’s not unique to humans,” said Dr Hobaiter.

Dr Susanne Shultz, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Manchester, said the study was praiseworthy in seeking to enrich our knowledge of the evolution of human language. But, she added, the results were “a little disappointing”.

“The vagueness of the gesture meanings suggests either that the chimps have little to communicate, or we are still missing a lot of the information contained in their gestures and actions,” she said. “Moreover, the meanings seem to not go beyond what other animals convey with non-verbal communication. So, it seems the gulf remains.”

2 . Maurice Druon of the French Academy once proposed that French should be made the principal legal language of the European Union (EU). He argued that its logic and precision made it the excellent judicial language. Others laughed. How very French of him!

The French are hardly alone in believing that their language is especially poetic, emotional. logical, precise, accessible or rich. But it turns out that the things people prize in their own languages can often be the same things foreign learners hate. Take the formal-informal distinction in words for "you". German and French have du and tu for friends and family, and sie and vous for unknown adults and formal speech. Natives of those languages miss that distinction when speaking English. Those whose languages (like English) don't make it in the first place often resent having this choice forced on them in French or German.

Linguists(语言学家）believe that languages differ not in what they can express, but in what they must. Given the time and willingness to explain or invent basic terms, any language could be used to talk about anything. But they vary wildly in what they insist speakers say, with the tu-yous distinction being just the tip of the iceberg Washo, a native language of Nevada, has four past and three future tenses, depending on how distant an event is in time. Tariana, from Brazil, has “evidentiality”：speakers choose one of five verb-endings to show how they know what they state to be true.   Jarawara, also from Brazil, distinguishes “we (including you)"and “we (without you)".

Languages, R M.W. Dixon of James Cook University in Australia says, are like a Western-style house. There are a few rooms you must have (kitchen, bedroom, living room, bathroom), and some optional (office, guest room). On a fixed budget, we can't have all the extras. As to which language is a “best” one, he thinks we should make our own list of desirable features, and then closely examine a few languages to decide whether one has more of them than another. But the list of advantages is itself a matter of judgment.

5 . While many of us may have been away somewhere nice last summer, few would say that we’ve “summered.” “Summer” is clearly a noun, more precisely, a verbed noun.

Way back in our childhood, we all learned the difference between a noun and a verb. With such a tidy definition, it was easy to spot the difference. Not so in adulthood, where we are expected to “foot” bills, “chair” committees, and “dialogue” with political opponents. Chances are you didn’t feel uncomfortable about the sight of those verbed nouns.

“The verbing of nouns is as old as the English language,” says Patricia O’Conner, a former editor at The New York Times Book Review. Experts estimate that 20 percent of all English verbs were originally nouns. And the phenomenon seems to be snowballing. Since 1900, about 40 percent of all new verbs have come from nouns.

Even though conversion (转化) is quite universal, plenty of grammarians object to the practice. William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, in The Elements of Style — the Bible for the use of American English — have this to say: “Many nouns lately have been pressed into service as verbs. Not all are bad, but all are suspect.” The Chicago Manual of Style takes a similar standpoint, advising writers to use verbs with great care.

“Sometimes people object to a new verb because they resist what is unfamiliar to them,” says O’Conner. That’s why we’re comfortable “hosting” a party, but we might feel upset by the thought of “medaling” in sports. So are there any rules for verbing? Benjamin Dreyer, copy chief at Random House, doesn’t offer a rule, but suggests that people think twice about “verbifying” a noun if it’s easily replaceable by an already existing popular verb. Make sure it’s descriptive but not silly-sounding, he says.

In the end, however, style is subjective. Easy conversion of nouns to verbs has been part of English grammar for centuries; it is one of the processes that make English “English.” Not every coinage (新创的词语) passes into general use, but as for trying to end verbing altogether, forget it.