Pierre Bancel Editor & Author

Pierre Bancel was attracted to languages and focused on learning a dozen including German, Russian, Hindi and Kabyle as well as Classical Latin and Greek. He has earned a MA in Language Sciences from the Université Auguste et Louis Lumière, Lyon, with an emphasis on comparative linguistics, instrumental phonetics and fieldwork on Bantu languages. He has worked as a copyeditor for the French dictionary, a journalist for various periodical publications, and as a translator by the United Nations in New York, Geneva and Vienna.
Bancel translated into French two books by Stanford linguists Joseph Greenberg and Merritt Ruhlen, and has published several dozens of linguistic research articles in scientific journals, many of them in the then Harvard-based Mother Tongue, of which he has become a coeditor since 2021. This is his first book, summarizing years of research and into language and how articulated words may have come about to an originally speechless ape species, turning them into humans in the process.