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“Translated, the inscription reads, ‘May this tusk root out the lice of the hair
and the beard.’ … This purpose was confirmed when the authors searched for
evidence of head lice on the comb under a microscope and found some remains on
the second tooth, still in the nymph stage of development.”
(See also the discussion at Language
Hat.)
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“Respondents explained that they found spellings with u to be less confusing
because that spelling kept the initial letter in common with usual — as long
as a silent e was there at the end to cue the pronunciation of the u away
from the sound in untie. I find this resolution elegant in its clunkiness:
Solving the problem of two unwritten sounds by writing a further, unpronounced
letter is a truly Englishy solution.”
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“For years, many linguists have believed that learning language is impossible
without a built-in grammar template. The new AI models
… demonstrate that the ability to produce grammatical language can be learned
from linguistic experience alone.”
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“This shift away needing to add ‘more emoji’ to creating more experiences that
leverage the existing set is an important evolution for the future of emoji
relevancy. Unicode can’t encode every concept in the world, every ingredient in
the planet, every muscle contortion of your face.”
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“[A] multilingual person’s dominant language can sometimes take a bigger hit in
certain scenarios. For example, in that colour naming task described earlier,
it can take longer for a participant to recall a word in their first language
when switching from their second, compared to the other way around.”