Unlocking the Universe of Languages
Your tongue performs incredible feats of precision for speech, all without a single bone. Discover the fascinating science of the "muscular hydrostat", a unique biological structure that allows your tongue…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…