Building a Dictionary from Silence
Imagine a language that has never been written down, a rich tapestry of human thought existing only in sound and memory. For a field linguist,…
Unlocking the Universe of Languages
Explore our complete collection of linguistic insights
Imagine a language that has never been written down, a rich tapestry of human thought existing only in sound and memory. For a field linguist,…
Ever heard someone say "for all intensive purposes" or describe a "doggy-dog world"? These aren't just random mistakes; they're "eggcorns"โlogically sound errors that reveal the…
You speak a language at home, a tongue filled with the warmth of family and the taste of tradition. Yet, when you try to use…
Before an AI can understand language, it must be cleaned. This post dives into text normalization, the unsung hero of computational linguistics that turns messy…
Long before the British arrived, a massive inscribed stone stood guard at the Singapore River's mouth, holding the secrets of a lost kingdom. In 1843,…
The world's first writing system, cuneiform, owes its distinctive wedge-shaped appearance to a surprisingly simple tool. This post explores how the physical act of pressing…
We often think of language as purely mental, but speaking is a physical act that burns calories. This post explores the biomechanics of speech and…
Ever wonder why your AI translator can handle "I love you" but butchers a single complex word in Turkish or Finnish? The culprit is the…
Long before 1492, the Americas were a kaleidoscope of linguistic diversity. The controversial "three-wave" migration theory attempts to explain this by classifying hundreds of Indigenous…
Williams Syndrome presents a fascinating linguistic paradox where remarkable verbal eloquence and a love for unusual words coexist with significant cognitive challenges. This unique genetic…
Does the direction you read in change how you perceive the world? This article delves into the surprising science of how writing systems like English,…
Reading feels like a smooth, continuous flow, but your eyes are actually performing a frantic, jerky dance across the page. We explore the science of…
Beyond the agile movements of the tongue and lips, our teeth stand as silent, crucial architects of speech. From the crisp 's' to the delicate…
We visualize the grand columns of the Roman Forum or the towering ziggurats of Babylon, but have you ever stopped to listen? The quest to…
For scientists and staff "wintering-over" in Antarctica, months of profound isolation have forged a unique micro-dialect. This "Antarctic English" features specialized jargon for work, neologisms…
In the 1960s, a radical new alphabet for English was born, bankrolled by the will of playwright George Bernard Shaw. Designed to be perfectly logical…
Before an AI can understand language, it must first label every single word with its grammatical function in a process called Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging. This…
We know dolphins communicate with a complex symphony of clicks and whistles, but could they have regional accents, just like humans? Groundbreaking research using AI…
In Islamic art, the graceful curves of calligraphy are not a matter of artistic whim, but of sacred mathematics. This article explores the rule-governed system…
What happens when a language preserved in a 1,000-year-old time capsule re-encounters its rapidly evolved cousin? The meeting of Icelandic and Norwegian is a story…