Cornelia Gerhardt, an English linguist at Saarland University in Germany and one of the founders of culinary linguistics, a field concerned with the ties between language and food, believes that English is a language that does not like to pack too much information into one word. “English is analytical, using a series of words to explain an idea,” Dr. Gerhardt said, “unlike polysynthetic languages (where entire concepts are reduced to a single word) or agglutinative languages (where suffixes and prefixes are added to a root word to create new words).”

[F]ully appreciating the challenges of communicating technical information in ASL requires understanding that ASL is not a signed form of English. It’s a distinct language, with specific rules and grammar. When there’s a new phenomenon in English, people tend to create a new word for it. “ASL tends to use agglutinative structure, which means that the signs are composed of different signs, which do not change much when strung together to make a word,” says Jon Henner, a deaf linguist specializing in ASL at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Longtime home of the Anasazi and inhabited by the Navajo since at least the 1700s, Canyon de Chelly is now a national park in Chinle, Arizona, and is operated by Navajos under the aegis of the National Park Service. The guides, who are all Navajo, speak of the remarkable geology of what is the second largest canyon in the United States, and about what has been learned from artifacts found in the 84,000-acre archaeological sanctuary.

The history of the towns that became Roman is known to us very imperfectly and unevenly …. Further, great mystery shrouds the particulars of their overthrow when the aegis of the Roman authority was withdrawn. There are but few survivals of towns to the present day, and parallels must be sought rather in Pannonia and North Africa than in the Western European Empire.

The designing duo of Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana constructed a Baroque Sicilian church façade as the background for their “King of Angels” collection. The show opened with a tableau of young stars in formalwear, including elaborately embroidered military-style jackets and floral suits, walking beneath a pair of cherubs. The colorful knitwear that featured cherubic putti in oval frames looked inspired by church ceilings, and angelic visages also graced motorcycle jackets.

Alexander Lingas, a musicologist and the music director of Cappella Romana [a vocal ensemble based in Portland, Ore.] …. said that some pieces only “made sense” inside the simulated acoustics. One example featured on the album is a cherubic hymn that likens the singers to angels …. [A]s the group rehearsed it with the virtual acoustics, a pattern of repeated undulating motifs built up rippling momentum until, as he described it, “the sound essentially achieved liftoff.”