TO BABEL AND BEYOND: How language is digitally coded in the brain

For twenty years, Luis Umali Stuart commuted between Manila and Quezon province in the Philippines, tracking down what appeared to him to be the digital remains in his native Tagalog tongue of the “one language” that all the world spoke before it was confounded in biblical Babel. Making now an exercise of the ancient tale (King James version), he launches on a guided tour of his remarkable find, an underlying grid structure in Tagalog, that intersects mathematics, language, and the brain in a single result. In an interdisciplinary journey to the edges of meaning and mind, Umali Stuart translates his findings into English and puts the grid to the test. Writing for “the well-abreast lay reader with a general curiosity in the mysteries of language and the brain; professionals and researchers also, looking for new answers in linguistics, natural language processing, the cognitive sciences, philosophies of language, and psychologies of learning,” he invites all to “a challenging surprise.”