the continuation of the sabzeruz festival

The enchanted amulet is a mysterious object, imbued with magic and secrecy. Concealed within its delicate design lies a hidden retreat, known only to those worthy of its discovery. This undisclosed sanctuary offers respite from the troubles and chaos of the outside world. To stumble upon this hidden haven is a stroke of luck, as its existence is shrouded in myth and legend. The amulet, acting as a key, unlocks the path to tranquility and restoration. As its possessor, you are granted access to a realm untouched by time, where nature flourishes and magic dances in the air.

Step into the magical world you know and love from the Land of Stories series and join Brystal Evergreen and her friends in Chris Colfer's series packed with adventure and imagination!

In 2009 two linguists published a widely cited paper called The myth of language universals , which seemed to find exceptions to other putatively universal rules. Madame Weatherberry has disappeared, and Brystal and her friends must work together to save her discovering surprising information about their instructor, as well as sinister plots jeopardizing the world along the way.

As its possessor, you are granted access to a realm untouched by time, where nature flourishes and magic dances in the air. Upon entering the retreat, you are immediately enveloped by a sense of serenity. The air is thick with the aroma of exotic flowers, and the gentle sound of a nearby waterfall lulls your senses.

A new book spells out the magic of language

I N “AVENGERS: ENDGAME”, a superhero blockbuster, the baddy’s Infinity Gauntlet gives him the power to snuff out the universe with the snap of a finger. This may sound impressive, but—although few realise it—ordinary people possess an infinite power, too: language.

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Write a new sentence and Google it. The chances are good that it appears nowhere among the billions on the internet. Steven Pinker, a professor of linguistics, reckons a conservative estimate of the number of grammatical, 20-word sentences a human might produce is at least a hundred million trillion—far more than the number of grains of sand on Earth. Most can easily be made longer (try adding “She said that…” to the beginning of any declarative sentence). In theory, the only thing preventing this power from being literally infinite is the human lifespan: some possible sentences would be too long to say even in threescore years and ten.

This awesome talent is the subject of a new book, “Language Unlimited” by David Adger of Queen Mary University, the president of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain. Mr Adger does not just celebrate language’s infinity. He maintains that it is the distinct result of a unique capacity, advancing a series of arguments whose best-known exponent is Noam Chomsky.

The book’s first, and strongest, claim is that human language is different from animal communication not just in scope, but in kind. Most important, it is hierarchical and nested in structure. A highly trained bonobo called Kanzi can obey commands such as “Give water [to] Rose”. But Kanzi does no better than random chance when told to “Give water and lighter to Rose.” Meanwhile, a two-year-old child tested alongside Kanzi quickly intuits that two nouns can make up a noun phrase, tucked as a direct object into a verb phrase, which in turn is part of a sentence. This “recursive” structure is key to syntax.

The second claim is that language is innate, not merely an extension of general human intelligence. Fascinating evidence comes from children who are deprived of it. Deaf pupils at a school in Nicaragua, having never shared a language with anyone before, created a grammatically ornate sign language on their own. A few deaf children in a Mexican family devised a rich sign system with complex grammatical features found in spoken tongues: in their “homesign”, nouns are preceded by a “classifier”, a sign indicating their type, just as they sometimes are in Chinese. It seems the human mind simply cannot help but deal in grammar.

A more controversial claim is that all human languages share what Mr Chomsky calls “universal grammar”. This proposition has taken some hard knocks. Whether recursion is universal, for example, is contested. In 2009 two linguists published a widely cited paper called “The myth of language universals”, which seemed to find exceptions to other putatively universal rules. The paper said it was not even clear that all the world’s languages observed a noun-verb distinction; Mr Adger counters with evidence that even the supposed outliers pay some attention to this split.

Many of the universals that hold up best are negative. There are many sensible things languages could do, but don’t. Notably, their grammars do not make use of “continuous” features, such as the length of vowels. For instance, a past-tense verb could be pronounced for a longer time to indicate how long ago the action occurred—perfectly logical, but no language does this. Syntax uses discrete units, not continuous ones. Whether this is proof of universality is a matter of opinion.

Lastly, Mr Adger embraces the latest of Mr Chomsky’s theories, “Merge”, a mental function in which two units may be joined to a larger one that can then be operated on by the mind’s grammar-processor. The two-year-old who beat Kanzi could Merge “water and lighter” and apply the verb to both; Kanzi seemed to treat words like beads on a string, rather than mentally grouping them into bigger units in a structure.

Mr Chomsky thinks a single human developed the ability to perform Merge tens of thousands of years ago, and that this is the only feature unique to human language. Mr Adger does not explicitly defend either of these claims. But his tour of Chomskyan linguistics is entertaining and accessible—in contrast to Mr Chomsky’s own notoriously baffling prose. His book is a handy introduction to a vexed debate on the infinite power of the finite mortal mind. ■

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "Everyday superheroes"

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the continuation of the sabzeruz festival