cognition

Constructing a Field Dictionary from Scratch

Imagine being the first outsider to document a language with no written form. How would you create its first-ever dictionary?…

3 weeks ago

The Unwritten Archive: Linguistics of Oral Traditions

Before writing, societies preserved immense libraries of knowledge within the human mind. The "unwritten archive" of oral tradition wasn't based…

3 weeks ago

Logophoricity: The Grammar of Point of View

How do we know who "he" is in the sentence "John said he was tired"? While English leaves it ambiguous,…

3 weeks ago

Case Syncretism: When Grammar Gets Efficient

Ever wondered why 'you' is the same whether you're doing the action or receiving it, unlike "I" and "me"? This…

3 weeks ago

One Slice, One Loaf: The Logic of Measure Words

Ever wondered why you can't say "one rice" in English or "one bread" in Chinese? This post dives into the…

3 weeks ago

The Grammar of a Bluff: Linguistics at the Poker Table

Beyond the cards and chips, the poker table is a battlefield of language where every action is a speech act.…

3 weeks ago

Reading Without Breaks: The Cognitive Cost of Scriptio Continua

Ancient scripts were often written as an unbroken stream of letters, a practice known as scriptio continua. This placed an…

3 weeks ago

The Physics of the Tongue: A Muscular Hydrostat

Your tongue performs incredible feats of precision for speech, all without a single bone. Discover the fascinating science of the…

3 weeks ago

The ‘Gavagai’ Problem: How We Map Words to Reality

Imagine a speaker in a new language points to a rabbit and says "gavagai." How do you know if it…

3 weeks ago

How a Phoneme is Born

Language sounds are always in flux, but where do new ones come from? This article explores the fascinating linguistic process…

3 weeks ago

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