The Story of One Whale Who Tried to Bridge the Linguistic Divide Between An

While captive in a Navy program, a beluga whale named Noc began to mimic human speech. What was behind his attempt to talk to us?

How the N-Word Became Unsayable

The evolution of the slur's use — and the taboo around it — tells a story about what our culture values.

How to sound more attractive

Many nationalities recognise that there is a tone of voice that is instantly alluring, but do some speakers have an unfair advantage?

The Challenges of Animal Translation

Artificial intelligence may help us decode animalese. But how much will we really be able to understand?

The 101 Greatest Endings in Movies History

Good finales offer catharsis. The best deny us closure altogether.

Groundbreaking Effort Launched To Decode Whale Language

In what may be the largest interspecies communication effort in history, scientists plan to use machine learning to try to decode what Sperm whales say to one another. National Geographic reports: [Sperm whales "speak" in clicks, which they make in rhythmic series called codas…

The Glossary of Happiness

Could understanding other cultures’ concepts of joy and well-being help us reshape our own?

How Did a Self-Taught Linguist Come to Own an Indigenous Language?

The Penobscot language was spoken by almost no one when Frank Siebert set about trying to preserve it. The people of Indian Island are still reckoning with his legacy.

Arabic NLP: Unique Challenges and Their Solutions

Pre-processing Arabic text for machine-learning using the camel-tools Python package

How to learn a language (and stick at it) | Psyche Guides

Forget about fluency and how languages are taught at school: as an adult learner you can take a whole new approach

CABINET / Language at the End of the World

The undecipherable rongorongo script of Easter Island

IdiomsOnline - Your Free Idioms Dictionary

Your Free Idioms Dictionary Idioms are phrases whose meanings cannot easily be known from the meanings of each word in the phrase. They usually have a fixed form that resists being altered without changing the meaning of the phrase. While idioms are quite transparent to native…

The Made-Up Language That Accidentally Became Real: The Story of Klingon

The Klingon language remains relevant to today’s culture and continues to evolve in surprising ways. (Finally, you must be thinking, some Star Trek content.)

Thirteen Fascinating and Untranslatable Words

Handy words from other languages with no English equivalent.

Essential Japanese: The Mental Model [pdf]

Essentials Guide to Japanese: The Mental Model by Japanese Complete. Master Japanese, get started for free.

The mind-blowing secret of the Armenian alphabet - PeopleOfAr

The Armenian alphabet is a true masterpiece of its era and knows many secrets. However, there is one in particular that still blows my mind. As some people know the Armenian alphabet was (re)invented in 405 AD by the Armenian linguist and theologian Mesrop Mashtots with the help…

Talking out loud to yourself is a technology for thinking | Psyche Ideas

Talking out loud to oneself is a technology for thinking that allows us to clarify and sharpen our approach to a problem

Reading, That Strange and Uniquely Human Thing

How we evolved to read is a story of one creative species.

Linguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing: 100 Essentials fro

Algorithms for text analytics must model how language works to incorporate meaning in language—and so do the people deploying these algorithms. Bender & Lascarides 2019 is an accessible overview of what the field of linguistics can teach NLP about how meaning is encoded in human…

12 Old Words That Survived by Getting Fossilized in Idioms

Here are a few lucky words that have been preserved in common English expressions.

Free Personalized online French lessons - Frantastique.com

Frantastique, the daily French workout. Personalized online Frantastiquelessons: all levels, all users. Free test.

How I Learned French in 12 Months | wes1350.github.io

(Also posted on Medium)

The Secret Language of Signs (2010)

Three years ago today, the 33 members of the Bluffton University baseball team boarded a bus at their campus in Bluffton, Ohio. It was early evening, a ...

The Family That Couldn’t Say Hippopotamus

The origins of language are not what inherited disorders seemed to suggest.

This is How Tiny Changes in the Words You Hear Impact Your Thinking

In a fascinating look at language, a professor lays out how political parties can sway supporters with tiny tweaks in word choice.

How ‘Embeddings’ Encode What Words Mean — Sort Of

Machines work with words by embedding their relationships with other words in a string of numbers.

When “stan” became a verb

A brief history of the term’s evolution.

Probabilistic language understanding

Why 40% of Vietnamese People Have the Same Last Name

Everyone knows a Nguyen, but how did that come to be?

How Capicola Became Gabagool: The Italian New Jersey Accent, Explained

A linguistic exploration.

Meet a scientist with a most delightful job: He studies baby laughter

Babies start laughing before they can speak, and this delicious sound just may serve as a powerful source of human communication and connection, says psychology researcher Caspar Addyman.

Why Arabic Is Terrific (Idle Words)

How to Learn Chinese: 8 Things I Wish I Had Known Before I Started - Scott H Young

Eight tips I wish I had known when I started. Learning Chinese is hard, but if you take the right approach, you'll be speaking, reading and writing soon!

The Hobo Code: An Introduction to the Hieroglyphic Language of Early 1900s

Many of us now use the word hobo to refer to any homeless individual, but back in the America of the late 19th and early 20th century, to be a hobo meant something more.

Language at the End of the World

On rongorongo, which no one can decipher.

Optical Scanning Technology Lets Researchers Recover Lost Indigenous Languages from Old Wax Cylinder Recordings

He did not, visionary though he was, conceive of one extraordinary use to which wax cylinders might be put—the recovery or reconstruction of extinct and endangered indigenous languages and cultures in California.

Wolfram Blog: News, Views and Insights from Wolfram

Livecoding event with Christopher Wolfram on the process he went through and the code generated in building the alien language for the movie Arrival.

Piecing Together an Ancient Epic Was Slow Work. Until A.I. Got Involved.

Scholars have struggled to identify fragments of the epic of Gilgamesh — one of the world’s oldest literary texts. Now A.I. has brought an “extreme acceleration” to the field.

Eslei! How a new generation is reinventing Spanglish

When Spanish meets English, new dialects emerge – giving us real-time insight into language evolution, linguists say.