Animals Make us Human

As a medium, Gordon Smith always gets asked questions about the nature of life and death - is there really an afterlife? Can we commune with our deceased loved ones? Yet some of the most interesting questions he receives are not about human loved ones - many people ask about their pets, too.

Dr. John McWhorter, one of America's leading linguists and a frequent commentator on network television and National Public Radio, takes you on an in-depth, 36-lecture tour of the development of human language, showing how a single tongue spoken 150,000 years ago has evolved into the estimated 6,000 languages used around the world today. For the past century linguistics has been one of the most exciting and productive fields in the social sciences. In the process of telling the story of language, Professor McWhorter introduces you to some of the current controversies in the discipline. Enjoy a really excellent course.