Linguistics

In comments on "Affected brogue", 12/19/2024, Benjamin Orsatti and others put Bernard Mayes forward as a quintessential RP speaker, including this advice: [I]f you'd like to listen to, say, 150 consecutive hours of Bernard Mayes (the man narrates my dreams now), you can do what I'm doing and borrow "The Decline and Fall of the […]

Following up on "AIs on Rs in 'strawberry'" (8/24/2024), "Can Google AI count?" (9/21/2024), "The 'Letter Equity Task Force'" (12/5/2024), etc., I thought I'd try some of the great new AI systems accessible online. The conclusion: they still can't count, though they can do lots of other clever things. Google Gemini 2.0 Experimental Advanced still […]

Today's SMBC starts this way: The whole thing: The Mouseover title: "Sadly, the patreon subscriber ideas were all better than mine." The Aftercomic: Update — Humorous (pseudo-)antonyms aside, my favorite example of the linguistic insights available from latinate morphology in English is the semantic drift evident in conscription, description, prescription, inscription, transcription, subscription, proscription, ascription, […]

The old movies have a great deal to say, and linguistics can explain why.

Words of the year do not have to be new coinages, but may be existing words that seem to have become particularly apposite or resonant.

Or rather, the phonetic symbolism of (an aspect of physics), as illustrated by a recent xkcd: Mouseover title: "Even when you try to make nice, smooth ice cubes in a freezer, sometimes one of them will shoot out a random ice spike, which physicists ascribe to kiki conservation." Wikipedia says that the bouba/kiki effect …was […]

Having just come back from two weeks in London and Belfast, this article is particularly germane for me: "The Irish and Scots Aren’t Fooled by Your Fake Accent: Some cultures are better than others at spotting impostors. The skill could allow them to pick out outsiders trying to infiltrate their groups." By Eric Niiler, WSJ […]

In 1991, I began the initial stage of my international project for the investigation of the Bronze Age and Iron Age Tarim mummies by focusing on their genetics. The reason for my doing so was because that was just around the time that techniques for the study of ancient DNA were being developed by Svante […]

Grammatically, that is a choice question: "is it city[-like] (or not)?" In other words, is whatever is at question sophisticated / modern? This phrase, which has been chosen by Sixth Tone* (12/17/24) as one of the top ten Chinese buzzwords of 2024 (I will list the other nine in the Appendix) is composed of two […]

William Labov, known far and wide as one of the most influential linguists of the 20th and 21st centuries, passed away this morning at the age of 97, with his wife, Gillian Sankoff, by his side. Bill is still very alive to us, so many of us, here at Penn. His voice reverberates. Mark is […]

우리말가꿈이 27기에서 진행한 백일장 대회 산문 부문 우수작 작품입니다.작성자: 우리말가꿈이 27기 자유모둠 개맹 박주은 가꿈이

우리말가꿈이 27기에서 진행한 백일장 대회에서 운문 부문 우수작 작품입니다.작성자: 우리말가꿈이 27기 영상 2모둠 깜냥깜냥 권현정 가꿈이

Previous research has shown that people tend to approach hypothetical problems in a more rational and less intuitive fashion when these are presented in a language that is not their native one.