“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.”
“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.)
“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.”
“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.”
“[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.”
“So when Hild is called hægtes, she is being labelled uncanny, powerful, fearsome, and dangerous — but also perhaps necessary to a group’s survival, even admirable, and most definitely to be paid attention to — not for her femininity but for her otherworldly power.”
“It might be embarrassing today to admit that I learned my first bits of English from the three volumes of the adventures of Larry, a game series that even back then wasn’t particularly respectable. But this was the only such game I knew, school in 1989 was still exclusively into Russian.”
“Properly understood, even the simplest conversation is an astonishing feat of interpersonal coordination. The remarkable thing is not that turn-taking so frequently goes wrong on Zoom, but that it ever goes right at all.”
“In other words, when you see a new word starting with ‘gi,’ your previous exposure to ‘gi’ words is basically telling you to flip a coin—it’s just as likely that you’ll decide to pronounce it with a hard g as with a soft g.”
(It’s a hard g.)
“In a single round, the gesture had gone from being tangibly linked to the concept of ‘nothing’ to being completely divorced from it.”
“[W]e find that ‘vegetable’ rarely applies to the entire plant (or to the same parts of the plant), while it also has a way of applying to things that aren’t actually vegetables. It is a category both broader and more specific that the thing it’s supposed to describe.”
“The cult of untranslatables goes beyond orientalism. They spread, meme-like, with the same misleading explanations repeated. Often, they hew suspiciously closely to stereotypes about the culture in question.”