CKG Words - Language Service Provider

Emily Wilson, whose 2017 translation of the Odyssey Christopher Nolan drew on for his new film, has brought Homer back from antiquity. One of the most celebrated translators in the world, she is reviving a fading academic discipline and shining with a harsh and brilliant light in the humanities’ gathering gloom. “The ancient Greeks teach one to be modern,” the poet and classicist A. E. Stallings observed. “They taught that to me and to Emily. It was time to strip away all the mannered layers—the tarnish of centuries—and she does that. Her translations have the freshness of the sky after a storm. Read Judith Thurman’s 2023 profile of the translator: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/KHq2J7

Vocabulary challenge: work vs job 💼

Complete the sentences with the correct word. Write your answers in the comments and tag a friend to take the challenge! ⬇️

In English, you can say something like “It rained last night” without explaining how you know. Maybe you saw it yourself, maybe someone told you, or maybe you just noticed wet streets in the morning. English leaves that information optional.

But in Quechua, a language spoken across the Andes, grammar actually requires speakers to specify their source of information. This phenomenon is known as evidentiality.

Speakers often have to mark whether they:

personally witnessed something,
heard it from someone else,
or inferred it from evidence.

So instead of simply saying “It rained,” a speaker may effectively be saying:

“It rained (I saw it myself).”
“It rained (someone told me).”
“It rained (I can tell from the evidence).”

What makes this fascinating is that these distinctions are not just optional words like “apparently” or “I heard.” They are built directly into the grammar of the language. Leaving them out can sound unnatural or incomplete.

This changes the way information is communicated socially. Speakers are constantly signaling how reliable or direct their knowledge is, making the difference between firsthand experience, rumor, and inference much more visible in everyday conversation.

Of course, speakers of evidential languages can still lie just like anyone else. The system does not magically make people more truthful. But it does mean that speakers are habitually encouraged to think about the source and certainty of information in a way English speakers often are not.

A staggering 44% of human languages are endangered – with culture, tradition and whole ways of understanding the world at stake