Across the globe, a race is under way to crack some of the last mysterious forms of writing that have never been translated.

Born JoAnne Deborah Byron in 1947 into a family of strivers in Queens, she split her time between her mother’s home in New ...

Despite the great diversity of human languages, recurring grammatical patterns (termed ‘universals’) have been found. Using the Grambank database of more than 2,000 languages, spatiophylogenetic ...