linguistics

But Clark said students should be aware of the great variance among majors — the transfer admission rate for computer science is 5%, for instance, compared with 60%-plus for history, linguistics and philosophy.

One 2009 linguistics study timed these differences - showing that, on average, Japanese speakers took seven milliseconds to respond while Danish speakers took about 470 milliseconds to intervene.

Dr Ellie Rye, who is a lecturer in English language and linguistics at the University of York, said apostrophes were a relatively new invention in our writing.

Its sole director was a former linguistics teacher.

“There’s a very big limit to what you can do with anything approaching gibberish,” said Jessie Peterson, who holds a doctorate in linguistics.