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+24 +1
The secret history of “Y’all”: The murky origins of a legendary Southern slang word
The phrase "y'all" might not simply be the shortened form of "you all" — but something far more complex
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I read and write in English, but I still dream in Amharic
It’s complicated to be an artist with family spanning multiple languages – my relatives love that I write but think I’m not writing for them. By Hannah Giorgis.
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After Centuries of Colonial Violence, a Resurgence of Indigenous Language Learning
There is renewed struggle by many Indigenous people to keep their native languages alive. By Jason Coppola.
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+50 +6
Computers Can Predict Schizophrenia Based on How a Person Talks
A new study finds a computerized word analysis is flawless guessing whether a person will have a psychotic episode. By Adrienne LaFrance.
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+16 +2
What Happened to O?
The death of an exclamation. By Gabe Rivin.
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+26 +3
The mysterious origins of punctuation
Commas, semicolons and question marks are so commonplace it seems as if they were always there – but that’s not the case. Keith Houston explains their history.
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+22 +5
Can you pronounce Llanfairpwllgwyngyll? This weatherman did
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch was having a particularly warm day on Monday.
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+24 +4
20 new words from the Oxford Dictionary, illustrated
From hangry to butt-dial.
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+18 +2
Lost in Translation: Proust and Scott Moncrieff
Scott Moncrieff's English translation of Proust’s “A la recherche du temps perdu” is widely hailed as a masterpiece in its own right. His rendering of the title as “Remembrance of Things Past” is not, however, considered a high point. William C. Carter explores the two men’s correspondence on this somewhat sticky issue and how the Shakespearean title missed the mark regarding Proust’s theory of memory.
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Intellectual Property? Why Words Matter In The Copyright Debate
Language matters. Whether we get to keep our liberties or not depends on whether those liberties are generally named in positive words. The same thing goes for the privileges of corporations.
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+10 +2
The Zipf Mystery
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How to Write with Style: Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Keys to the Power of the Written Word
Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writing. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style. These revelations tell us as readers what sort of person it is with whom we are spending time. Does the writer sound ignorant or informed, stupid or...
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Très Childish
Itchy Feet: September 20 2015
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Meet the man who invents languages for a living
David J. Peterson has crafted languages for TV shows and films — even a whole language for a single giant, in Game of Thrones. For him, every language is a balance of the technical and the artistic.
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Nabokov on the Sins of Translation
Vladimir Nabokov explains the perils of translating, and the great Russian short story.
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Do languages influence our way of thinking?
Each language forces you to think in a slightly different way. There are many concepts that can be expressed easily in one language but not in another. The first thing people think of when asked about differences in vocabulary used in different languages is just isolated words, such as English having no equivalent to the German word Schadenfreude, which means “pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others”.
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Superscript: South Korea’s hangul alphabet
“LIKE trying to fit a square handle into a round hole” is how Sejong the Great, a Korean king, viewed the practice of using hanja, classical Chinese characters, to transcribe Korean. Hanja recorded meaning alone, not sound, and only aristocrats knew it. So the king and his literary circle crafted an alphabet from scratch and started promoting it in 1446.
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Will emoji become a new language?
The year 2015 could be called the year of the emoji. They have landed a teenage boy in a police cell and prompted Vladimir Putin’s wrath in Russia, and the loveable smiley faces are even set to come to life in their own Hollywood film. Emoji are now used in around half of every sentence on sites like Instagram, and Facebook looks set to introduce them alongside the famous “like” button as a way of expression your reaction to a post.
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The earliest known abecedary
A flake of limestone (ostracon) inscribed with an ancient Egyptian word list of the fifteenth century BC turns out to be the world’s oldest known abecedary.
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Whales synchronize their songs across oceans, and there’s sheet music to prove it
Visualizing the structure of whale music reveals more similarities to human music than you might expect. By David Rothenberg.
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