There are very few places in the world where you have to learn a language with no language in common. It's called a monolingual field situation.

With technology, there is so much isolation with people now, that there are very few places where you can connect.

I joined a organisation called Wycliffe Bible Translators that had the objective of translating the Bible into all the languages of the world, and to do that you had to study linguistics, and so that was my initial exposure to linguistics.

It's wrong to try and convert tribal societies. What should the empirical evidence for religion be? It should produce peaceful, strong, secure people who are right with God and right with the world. I don't see that evidence very often.

The U.K. is one of the few places in the world that has final salary pensions.

Language is possible due to a number of cognitive and physical characteristics that are unique to humans but none of which that are unique to language. Coming together they make language possible. But the fundamental building block of language is community.