Linguistics #

Linguistics has always interested me: in fact I initially planned to study it at University, but didn’t get good enough marks to get into the international exchange program degree I applied for, so I ended up studying mathematics instead.

  • This incredibly extensive dictionary of terms in science fiction from books, TV and popular culture.
  • About Palawa Kani, a reconstructed language that combines features from many extinct and related Tasmanian Aboriginal languages. There is an attempt to create a sort of new lingua franca with it.
  • Uncleftish Beholding, a description of atomic theory which shows what English might have looked like if it had no words of non-Germanic origin. Loved this.
  • The “Bouba/kiki” effect, which suggests that the way things are named is not arbitrary but related to physical properties of the object being named.
  • The Norweigan language conflict, a really interesting and long culture war in Norway about which version of their language should be the “real” Norweigan.
  • A great post with some great advice: you should be using Webster’s 1913 dictionary, it truly does show off the beauty and depth of the English language.
  • This tongue-in-cheek paper which tries to detemine the most difficult natural languages for learners of various other languages, based on the prevalence of “it’s all Greek to me”-style phrases.
  • Someone inventing a new language with the AI chatbot ChatGPT.
  • A great post which tries to “write English like Chinese”.
  • A paper proposing that is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought.
  • A fantastic podcast (though you can also just read the transcripts) about the history of the English language, from Proto-Indo-European to Modern English.