How the Deaf Read Lips: A Feat of Phonetics
Contrary to Hollywood depictions, lip-reading is less like a superpower and more like a high-stakes puzzle with most of the pieces missing. Since only 30-40% of English sounds are visible…
Tag: speech
Color as a Grammatical Marker
In most languages, color is purely descriptive, but in some systems, it plays a grammatical role. This post explores how Cued Speech uses a "color-coding" analogy with handshapes to distinguish…
AI’s Tone Shift: The Linguistics
The startlingly human new AI voices are more than a programming feat; they represent a breakthrough in computational prosody. Linguistics teaches us that the "music" of our speech—its rhythm, stress,…
Re-voicing the Past: The AT-ST Project
We can read the words of Charlemagne's era, but what did they actually sound like? A groundbreaking initiative called the "Audio-visual corpus of Old German" (AT-ST) is using clues from…
The Language of Numbers Stations
Tune your shortwave radio to the right frequency, and you might hear it: a disembodied voice reading strings of numbers into the void. These are numbers stations, one of the…
The Descent of the Larynx: How a Quirky Evolutionary Shift Gave Humans the Power of Speech
Human speech is a miracle of evolution, but it comes at a steep price. Our ability to form a rich variety of sounds is thanks to a descended larynx, a…