Sir

I congratulate Erez Lieberman and colleagues on their entertaining, enthralling and, above all, well-written Letter 'Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language' (Nature 449, 713–716; 2007). Nature articles outside my sphere of interest are of interest to me as far as the abstract; after that I am rapidly lost in a forest of jargon, technicalities and poorly articulated background information.

I had little prior interest in linguistic evolution, yet Lieberman and colleagues captured my attention to the end of their Letter. It was so well written that I was compelled to read out the cleverest snippets to my office-mates.

This is a scientific paper that has truly exemplified the aim of Nature to provide a forum for work with interdisciplinary appeal. I congratulate and thank both the authors and the selecting editors.