Reforming English Spelling(blog.oup.com)
33 points by jruohonen | 93 comments
OUPblog column by Anatoly Liberman arguing for a minimalist, gradual reform of English spelling and describing the English Spelling Society's recent congress.
#linguistics on Hacker News
19 stories tagged linguistics, newest first.
Why We Still Cannot Read Etruscan(veiledantiquity.com)
4 points by darkwater | 0 comments
Blog post explaining why Etruscan remains poorly understood despite being pronounceable, since most of the ~13,000 surviving inscriptions are funerary.
Linguistic humor, Foreign hotel signs(ling.upenn.edu)
6 points by sublinear | 2 comments
A collection of humorously mistranslated English signs and notices from hotels and businesses around the world, hosted on a UPenn linguistics page.
Tech Needs Humanists More(passo.uno)
62 points by eigenBasis | 73 comments
Blog post on passo.uno arguing that tech writers should study humanities and languages rather than coding or AI to stay valuable in the AI era.
Experiencing writing at our recent Chinese calligraphy workshop(viewsproject.wordpress.com)
35 points by surprisetalk | 1 comments
A VIEWS Project blog post describing a recent Chinese calligraphy workshop where participants experienced writing firsthand.
Amateur may have cracked Linear A(aiclambake.com)
395 points by Kosturdistan | 154 comments
Blog post on AI Clambake reporting that self-taught AI engineer Tom Di Mino claims to have deciphered the Minoan Linear A script, pending expert review.
Try and(ygdp.yale.edu)
611 points by treetalker | 306 comments
Yale Grammatical Diversity Project page describing the English 'try and' construction, as in 'I'm gonna try and change the course of hip hop again.'
Why English doesn't use accents(deadlanguagesociety.com)
318 points by sandbach | 528 comments
A Dead Language Society newsletter post by Colin Gorrie explaining why English spelling lacks diacritic accents while French uses many.
Square Theory(aaronson.org)
691 points by aaaronson | 128 comments
Adam Aaronson's blog post introducing "square theory," an idea about wordplay structures that emerged from the Crosscord crossword Discord community.
Surnames from nicknames nobody has any more(blog.plover.com)
927 points by JNRowe | 430 comments
Blog post from The Universe of Discourse explaining English patronymic surnames derived from medieval nicknames, some of which are no longer in use.
Evidence of oldest known alphabetic writing unearthed in ancient Syrian city(hub.jhu.edu)
327 points by Someone | 240 comments
Johns Hopkins Hub article on clay cylinders found at an ancient Syrian site bearing what may be the oldest known alphabetic writing.
Why wordfreq will not be updated(github.com)
1620 points by tomthe | 483 comments
SUNSET.md in the wordfreq GitHub repository explaining why the word-frequency dataset, a snapshot through 2021, will no longer be updated.
![Screenshot of gwern.net: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]](https://hn.urlbox.com/shots/renders/2024/6/22/cdc86675-2b19-489c-9146-d2abd1321636.jpg)
Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf](gwern.net)
365 points by hardmaru | 279 comments
PDF of a 2024 paper by Fedorenko et al. arguing that language is primarily a tool for communication rather than for thought.
Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'(independent.co.uk)
335 points by rudolfwinestock | 270 comments
Independent news article reporting that Noam Chomsky, 95, can no longer talk after suffering a medical event, according to a former assistant.
Antarctic English(en.wikipedia.org)
332 points by benbreen | 139 comments
Wikipedia article on Antarctic English, the variety of English spoken by scientists and workers in Antarctica and the subantarctic islands.
Did English ever have a formal version of "you"? (2011)(english.stackexchange.com)
461 points by ent101 | 391 comments
An English Language & Usage Stack Exchange question asking whether English ever had a formal second-person pronoun like German Sie or French vous.
Who lusts for certainty lusts for lies(etymonline.com)
412 points by hprotagonist | 140 comments
An Online Etymology Dictionary column arguing that Google Ngram Viewer n-gram data is unreliable and misleading for word history research.
How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?(latin.stackexchange.com)
408 points by micouay | 282 comments
A Latin Stack Exchange answer about translating the phrase "She said goodbye too many times before" into Latin.
Toki Pona: an attempted universal language with only ~120 words(cohost.org)
448 points by Fraterkes | 195 comments
A Cohost post by user mcc (andi) about learning Toki Pona, a minimalist constructed language with roughly 120 words.