It was towards the end of the 80s that I started seeing cars with metallic paint. They were colors that, to the eyes of a child from that time, were fascinating. An older boy told me that color was “turquoise green,” but another contradicted him, “it’s turquoise blue.” I didn’t know what to say. But the truth is they couldn’t agree on whether it was green or blue. It was a color in between, and we didn’t have a clear label for it. The confusion was total when another day another car appeared and a third person said, “what a great turquoise pink!” The cat was out of the bag, I thought. That boy identified the metallic effect with “turquoise.” So, who is right? The one who said “turquoise green” or the one who said “turquoise blue”? If we search online, we’ll see that both turquoise green and turquoise blue are used. Scottish Gaels lean towards ‘turquoise blue’ (‘tuirc-ghorm’) and the English, more pragmatically, simply say ‘turquoise’. How can it be that we see the same thing, but identify it differently?

As is well known, children often ask adults difficult questions. One I've been asked more than once is: Who was the first person to speak? Or a variation of it: How did people begin to speak? It's a question that has intrigued humanity for millennia.

"What are the opportunities for studying Linguistics?" This is the most common question parents, siblings, and friends ask us when we declare, with the joy of having passed the university entrance exams and the light in the eyes of youth, that we want to pursue these studies. This also applies to any philology. We always tend to think of teaching (it's the most common option, let's not fool ourselves), but we will find philologists and linguists in bookstores, publishing houses, libraries, in language correction services of many public and private entities, not to mention radio or television. Many people tend to think: "Of course, they're a literary person."

Surely, at some point in your life, you have been told that Catalan and Castilian are Romance languages, which belong to the same family. What does it mean, however, that they are part of the same language family? We've heard about language families since we were in high school. Traditionally, we're told that we belong to the Romance family, because Catalan comes from Latin, like so many other languages.

Charles Darwin, in his book The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) stated that "the formation of different languages and different species, as well as the evidence that both have developed through a gradual process, are curiously the same." In the 19th century, a language was compared to a living organism: it is born, grows, and dies. And also, like certain organisms, it can multiply and expand. This can happen more or less quickly, or more slowly.