Language
Yes, language is important. We need it to think. We need it to communicate. Yet, most of the time we take language for granted. At least our own language.
Examined more consciously, lots of its features are really weird. Pronunciation. The sounds. Or no sounds, as in sign-language. Word order. Lots of ambiguities. The fact that language changes all the time. The fact that there are so many languages (even if the number is decreasing rapidly now).
Even though language is so crucial, we allow it to evolve naturally. The laws that govern that evolution seem blind. For example, where I live people become lazy in differentiating between /f/ and /v/. Obviously, that can lead to confusion. We end up with words that sound the same, but have different meanings. Isn't that silly?
I am not a linguist. A linguist would be able to comment on a lot of this stuff. Unfortunately, most of the research that linguists publish is highly technical, often unreadable for the layperson. A few linguists try to convey their findings to the larger public. That can be very interesting. It can be exceptionally boring as well.
On this site I plan to collect some language related material that amazes me. At some point I'm bound to make a link page to articles by people that have actual linguistic training, and can say really illuminating and interesting things about the different features of language. The material that I will gather myself will necessarily be trivial, have no useful analysis, be boring for someone else than me. It's probably going to be a project comparable to the stone collecting of a child. No worries, in my experience no one will find these pages anyway—Google has become very good in filtering out the trivial. Here it goes.