Impakter The Preposterous Discourse Debate: ‘Right?’ Vs. ‘Um’ and Why Writing Rules In the hallowed halls of linguistic flap, a silent sophism rages. On one side, we have the verbal tic of validation, “Right?” On the other, the contemplative waver of hesitancy, “Um.” What if these two simple utterances form the foundation of human raison d’être? If they’re all we’ve got, which one is emperor, and is there […] The post The Preposterous Discourse Debate: ‘Right?’ V...| Impakter
This is embarrassingly out of date, but since it’s literally about Time Bridges, that makes it all the more apropos, right? (If you’re wondering how we even dug up something this old, you might like our recent series on backlogs and freshenable collections.) The Future of Life Podcast is mostly about...| blog.beeminder.com
a conscientious objector—UK, 1916—from the initial syllable of the noun ‘conscientious objector’ and the suffix ‘-ie’, used to form familiar diminutives| word histories
Effective human communication is based on the cooperative principle, i.e., listeners and speakers act cooperatively and mutually accept one another to be understood in a particular way. However, when seeking to present a particular point of view, speakers may prefer to be economical with the truth. To attract citations and funding, researchers sell their work […]| The Shape of Code
I’m excited to announce Torre, a new product that translates instantly between Spanish and English. A lot of native English speakers I talk to don’t understand why a better approach to …| Pete Warden's blog
A couple weeks ago we had close to 9 hours of downtime. Some kind of meltdown in the datacenter in Newark where our servers live. A lot of websites/apps were affected, which I guess lessens the shame of it, though it’s embarrassing we’re not more robust to this kind of thing. Anyway, check out status.beeminder.com...| blog.beeminder.com
I have several weird and mostly useless super-powers. Some of them are actually super-powers that don’t have a rational explanation; I’ll leave them for other posts. The one I’ll …| Aharoni in Unicode
Review by Liz Dexter When we talk about women’s safety, it’s health and safety; when we talk about activist translation, we’re really talking about good translation. Jen Calleja is a...| Shiny New Books
Jonathan Choti, Associate Professor of African Languages and Cultures in the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures at Michigan State University, recently traveled to Kenya to lead a workshop focused on revitalizing that country’s indigenous languages, many of which face extinction due to the predominance of English and Swahili in education, government, and media.| College of Arts & Letters
Ever heard that Arabic has 10 million words? That English has a million? French has 80,000, or that the Alaskan Inuits have no word for love but 16 for snow? Why is that? Words are only words because we all mutually agree that they're words. Stare long enough and the semantic saturation will kick inRead More| Frank M Taylor
Over on the Futures of Language website we are advertising a PhD and a postdoc position. If you are interested in fundamental questions at the intersection of language, interaction and technology, have a look. We offer a number of resources:| The Ideophone
Linguistic fillers are the utterances we use during speech that do not have a particular meaning. They are often perceived as not serving any purpose, and as a sign of distractedness, or nervousness. However, there are many reasons for using these seemingly useless phrases and utterances. Exploring linguistic fillers They’re used in every language – why? Speech dis...| Nimdzi
We, Rachel and Michael Aubrey, are giving an academic forum at Dallas International University on Thursday, July 31⋅12:30 – 1:20pm CDT. Title: Greek & Hebrew Prepositions and the Source-Path-Go…| Koine-Greek
Constrained writing is fun; moreover, sometimes it’s seriously impressive. This post is a tour of some of my favorite examples of constrained writing and wordplay. Mots d’Heures: Gousse…| Unexpected Values
Before they gather any more digital dust, here are a few dozen links on a linguistic theme – etymology, grammar, slang, dialect, gesture, writing, spelling, animal communication, etc. – for your re…| Sentence first
Welcome to the Dreevpeeve of the day. I’ve actually seen “deprecate” misused so often that I was worried that, as usual, the prescriptivists would soon have to concede defeat. But so far all the dictionaries are holding firm. This is merely in the category of Common Misconception and so I’m doing my...| blog.beeminder.com
If you’ve ever started learning a language, you probably remember the excitement of those early wins: ordering your first coffee abroad, understanding a few lines of a song, or nailing a tricky grammar rule. But what happens when the progress slows, and it feels like you’re not improving anymore? Welcome to the language learning plateau […]| Fluent Forever
The linguistic field of prosody, the story of melody, pitch, and other hard-to-study verbal traits, is suddenly hot.| Atlas Obscura
A millennial linguist dares to speak to a gen-alpha audience in their native tongue.| The Scholarly Kitchen
How I recovered a Bitcoin passphrase by performing a Breadth-First search on typos of increasing Damerau-Levenshtein distances from an initial guess.| alexbowe.com
This blog post is an introduction on how to make a key phrase extractor in Python, using the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK). But how will a search engine know what it is about? How will this document be indexed correctly? A human can read it and tell that it is| alexbowe.com
Dallas International University (DIU) has announced their new masters degree program that combines the biblical languages and linguistics in one place: MA in Biblical Languages and Linguistics.| Koine-Greek
Intended audience Those with a passing interest in linguistics. Occasion April Cools' 2025 — a little late! O...| blog.waleedkhan.name
When we talk about the semantics of prepositional phrases, we are talking about a specific kind of conventionalized pattern. Conventional patterns are arbitrary in the sense that they are not predictable from one language to another. But in another way, they are nevertheless motivated (Sweetser 1990). There is a reason they occur as they do. Basic cognitive processes influence how different prepositions extend from spatial meanings to more abstract ones.| Koine-Greek
I saw a thing fly by on PsyArxiv and must write about it. Warning: snark detected. This is a new paper by Green, Kong, Brysbaert, and Keogh with the following abstract:| The Ideophone
We will not go gentle into that good night here at Strong Language. We will rage. Oh, we will rage, all right, uttering our shit’s, fuck’s, and damn’s until the bitter-ass end. And that’s true for …| Strong Language
TL;DR: It takes two to tell a story: narrator and audience. Response tokens or continuers like ‘mhmm’ play a key role in making stories work. Two new papers extend the study of continuers across languages and modalities. Work by Lutzenberger et al. reveals the importance of minimal tokens that don’t occupy the main articulators in British Sign Language and Spoken British English. And a study by Börstell showcases a neat methodological replication and extension of the sequential search ...| The Ideophone
Matthew Congdon is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on ethics, social philosophy, and aesthetics. He is the author of the book, Moral Articulation: On the Development of New Moral Concepts (Oxford University Press, 2024). He has written articles on many topics, including emotions, moral change, interpersonal recognition, Aristotelian ethical…| Blog of the APA
Tom Wolfe, whose legend began in journalism, takes us on an eye-opening journey that is sure to arouse widespread debate. The Kingdom of Speech is a captivating, paradigm-shifting argument that speech — not evolution — is responsible for humanity’s complex societies and achievements. From Alfred Russel Wallace, the Englishman who beat Darwin to the theory of natural selection but later renounced Read More ›Source| Books – Discovery Institute
[Originally posted to linguistics.stackexchange.com as an answer to a question by user Manishearth, who asked: “I’ve heard many times that learning German is easier for those who speak Sanskrit, and vice versa. Is there any linguistic basis for this? What similarities exist between the two languages that may be able to explain this?”] This is […]| The Lumber Room
What I did in the last quarter of 2023: 2 conferences, 2 Tom Scott videos, 3 novels, 7 years of Lingthusiasm, and a Shakespeare humour audiobook recorded| Gretchen McCulloch
“It is no exaggeration to say that more has been learned about languages in the past twenty-five years […]| Koine-Greek
Last year, we shared our SBL paper from the Cognitive Linguistics session, "Constructions and the Source-Path-Goal Schema". ventually, we realized that it was more practical to just upload the video as a whole. We only realized that we never shared the full video until today when a friend expressed appreciation to us for our paper. So without further ado, Constructions and the Source—Path—Goal Schema in its totality:| Koine-Greek
I’m very honoured to have been named among the winners of the Philip Leverhulme Prize for Classics this year. Not only am I in amazing company on a list of great Classicists in the UK, but I …| Katherine McDonald
Since I started writing professionally three years ago, I’ve read dozens of books, style guides, and advice columns on how to write well. Out of all these, The Sense of Style is the only writing guide I can unreservedly recommend. It’s the one book that has actually made me a better writer. Reading it has paid me even […] The post How to Write Well: 4 Lessons From ‘The Sense of Style’ by Steven Pinker appeared first on Stephan Joppich.| Stephan Joppich
Reading Time: 12minutes This here is a friendly introduction to linguistics for programmers. There are many ways to improve our programming skills: watching videos, reading articles, hackathons, and doing code competitions. But there’s another way that gives us less time in front of an IDE: Learning to think about how programming works. We’re not talking about how compilersRead More| Frank M Taylor
Discussion of Hugo Award nominees for best novel, other science fiction novels, and analysis of the awards. We read all the nominees before we vote.| hugoclub.blogspot.com
Jackson Wolf, a theoretical linguistics Ph.D. student at Georgetown, spent his summer teaching neurodivergent students reading skills at Lindamood-Bell.| The Graduate School of Arts & Sciences
If you’re looking for something to listen to as we start 2023, have a look at the Radio 3 Free Thinking episode I recorded back in October, which is still available through the BBC website. There’s also still plenty of time to catch the British Museum exhibition Hieroglyphs: Unlocking Ancient Egypt referred to in the... Continue Reading →| Katherine McDonald
Developing and teaching new modules is probably one of my favourite parts of my job. It doesn’t come around very often, and it’s hugely fun to think about presenting cutting-edge research to undergraduates, who are so open to new ideas and take them to pieces very effectively. So I was very excited to be asked,... Continue Reading →| Katherine McDonald
I’m very pleased to say that my new sourcebook, Italy Before Rome, is out on Friday. If you want to use the discount code below, which is valid until the end of 2021, then you can order direct from the publisher on this link: https://routledge.pub/ItalyBeforeRome So you can get an idea of what the book... Continue Reading →| Katherine McDonald
Presenting the most recent addition to my now very long-running series of inscriptions in various ancient writing systems in cake form: a cake version of an inscription from Pompeii, written not in…| It's All Greek To Me
I’ve created a huge tree to show the relationship between 64 living Indo-European languages, and many dead or extinct ones.With this template I’m planning on making a series of images to show how various words in these languages have shared etymologies. This is the first image in that series: words for “name”. If it doesn’t […]| Starkey Comics
fuckyeahchinesefashion: 26 Chinese dialects edition of Let It Go. By order: Mandarin普通话, Shanxi陕西, Dalian大连, Shanghai上海, Shantou汕头, Jinhua金华, Shanxi山西, Sichuan四川, Dongbei东北, Taizhou台州, Taiyuan太原, Beijing北京, Suzhou苏州, Hefei合肥, Hangzhou杭州, Kejia客家, Minnan闽南, Tianjin天津, Wenzhou温州, Nanchang南昌, Wuxi无锡, Fuzhou福州, Changsha长沙, Guiliu桂柳, Wuhan武汉, Cantonese粤语. Notes: there are more than 80 main d...| That's What Xu Said
What does the word “ball” mean to a dog? Does he understand it the same way we do? Dogs with an extensive vocabulary of object names, or as we call them, Genius Dogs, can help us answer this question. In last week’s article we reviewed the very first experiments conducted with Genius Dogs. Those… The post The First Genius Dogs (2nd part) appeared first on Genius Dog Challenge.| Genius Dog Challenge
In this article we will review some of the world’s smartest dogs, and their contribution to science. We will also use the example of “fast mapping” to show how the scientific path turns and twists when old findings are observed under a new light. The first genius dog Rico, an 8-year-old male border collie… The post The First Genius Dogs appeared first on Genius Dog Challenge.| Genius Dog Challenge
The weather has been so weirdly warm this month that I never got around to a Friday Notes for February, so I’m extending the month. Call it a leap year “plus one”. Truth is, IR…| Logos con carne
I am extremely happy to announce that NWO will be funding the project Futures of Language over the next five years. We will start in September 2024; stay tuned for news about positions for postdocs, PhDs, and research software engineers.| The Ideophone
Avenue of Trees, sunset (David Zdobylak)| Save The Phenomena
tl;dr It’s unclear. There’s a clear English-language lineage, but there really are similar African proverbs and it’s hard to rule out cross-pollination.| Andrew Whitby
Language is what makes us human: one of those things, perhaps the one thing, that sets us apart. But there is an interesting asymmetry in our willingness to ascribe linguistic capacities to non-humans: animals tend to be seen as having none, whereas computers are increasingly thought to have mastered language. This asymmetry is the focus of a recent essay I co-authored with a range of people, led by Marlou Rasenberg.1| The Ideophone
We have a new paper out in which we argue that the robustness and flexibility of human language is underpinned by a machinery of interactive repair. Repair is normally thought of as a kind of remedial procedure: a system for handling clarification questions, just one of those things we need to stay out of communicative trouble. Simply put (and oversimplifying only a bit), we argue we wouldn’t have complex language if it weren’t for this system of interactive repair.| The Ideophone
There is a minor industry in speech science and NLP devoted to detecting and removing disfluencies. In some of our recent work we’re showing that treating talk as sanitised text can adversely impact voice user interfaces. However, this is still a minority position. Googlers Dan Walker and Dan Liebling represent the mainstream view well in this blog post:| The Ideophone
There’s a new paper out in the Journal of Positive Psychology: “Towards a positive cross-cultural lexicography: Enriching our emotional landscape through 216 ‘untranslatable’ words pert…| linʛuischtick
Want to speak a new language? These top 5 hacks will help you learn how to memorize vocabulary effectively and make words stick.| Fluent Forever
Discover how to learn vocabulary in your target language by applying tried-and-tested techniques to make the words stick.| Fluent Forever
Can you learn a language just by listening? Get an honest answer plus pro tips from Fluent Forever’s polyglot founder Gabe Wyner.| Fluent Forever
Check out this blog post to learn how to say Merry Christmas in 11 different languages and how to pronounce it all correctly!| Fluent Forever
Discover the top reasons why you should learn Dutch! This article will show you the best tips and resources to learn this amazing language.| Fluent Forever
