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+4 +1
Speed reading apps may kill comprehension
A few months back, there was a lot of buzz about a new display technology that promised to greatly increase people's reading speeds. The approach, typified by Spritz, displays words one at a time in a single location. As the speed cranks up and words fly by, the service seems to live up to its promise: each word registers as it briefly flits across the screen.
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+22 +4
The discovery of a new language can help explain how we communicate
Most of the news about minority languages is that they’re endangered or dying off, and the only new languages we hear about are those created for Hollywood sci-fi blockbusters. But sometimes, linguists find a previously unrecorded language — and when they do, it’s a sign language.
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+36 +6
The Largest Vocabulary in Hip hop
Literary elites love to rep Shakespeare’s vocabulary: across his entire corpus, he uses 28,829 words, suggesting he knew over 100,000 words and arguably had the largest vocabulary, ever. I decided to compare this data point against the most famous artists in hip hop. I used each artist’s first 35,000 lyrics. That way, prolific artists, such as Jay-Z, could be compared to newer artists, such as Drake.
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+14 +6
Bad British MLB Commentary
What happens when a British guy who knows nothing about baseball tries to commentate an MLB game? We asked Anthony Richardson from the Exploding Heads to give us his very British take on Oakland Athletics-Houston Astros highlights. As you can imagine, hilarity ensued.
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+15 +3
Perfect Match: Brazilian Kids Learn English by Video Chatting With Lonely Elderly Americans
It's such a great, simple idea: Young Brazilians want to learn English. Elderly Americans living in retirement homes just want someone to talk to. Why not connect them?
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+19 +3
What Language Does Your State Speak?
Last month, I wrote about the fun and the pitfalls of viral maps, a feature that included 88 super-simple maps of my own creation. As a follow-up, I’m writing up short items on some of those maps, walking through how I created them and how they succumb (and hopefully overcome) the shortfalls of viral cartography.
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+14 +5
"Thank you" in many languages
Jennifer's Language Page - Greetings in more than 2800 languages
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+21 +2
Net neutrality jargon explained
Here are all the words and phrases you need to know to understand net neutrality.
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+17 +3
The Story of One Whale Who Tried to Bridge the Linguistic Divide Between Animals and Humans
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?
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+5 +1
What sounds and letters are most likely to trip up contestants at the National Spelling Bee?
This week 281 students between the ages of 8 and 15 will assemble outside Washington, D.C., for the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Over the last 10 years, it’s taken an average of 645 words and 5,680 letters to weed out the wannabes from the one who outspells them all. Looking at past trends, we can take a shot at predicting which letters and sounds will cause contestants to go home D-E-F-E-A-T-E-D and brō-kən.
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+7 +2
Is French the language of the future?
The French are a proud bunch, especially when it comes to their mother tongue. So it must have been hard for them to take a backseat and watch English become the lingua franca of the 21st century. But revenge could be on the horizon: The language beloved by Parisian poets, Russian aristocrats and pretentious grad students is set to reclaim its title when it becomes the world's most commonly spoken language by the year 2050, according to a study by Natixis, an investment bank.
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+14 +5
Humans Learned to Talk by Copying Birds and Monkeys, Linguists Claim
Humans learned to talk to one another by copying birds and other primates sometime in the last 100,000 years, experts have said. Linguists from MIT suggest that human communication could have evolved from older systems used by birds and primates. Previous research has found that humans derive the melodic part of language from birds. However, the authors also say we evolved our pragmatic content-carrying part of speech from other primates.
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+21 +5
The FBI maintains an 83-page glossary of Internet slang. And it is hilariously, frighteningly out of touch.
The FBI promises its list will prove useful both professionally and “for keeping up with your children and/or grandchildren.”
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+1 +1
Funky English Slang - 11 Expressions We Love!
We love English slang on Funky English. Slang words can help our speech sound more natural and add an element of fun to any informal conversation. Slang expres…
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+11 +2
We Got a Bunch of People to Turn Off Autocorrect for a Week. Here’s What Happened.
If you use a phone to send text messages, chances are you’ve been burned by autocorrect at some point. You’ve typed messages to friends or co-workers wherein “meeting” morphed into “mating,” or the phone changed “Trish” to “trash” without you noticing—making you appear ridiculous, incompetent, or drunk. We’ve all been there.
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+14 +2
The Most Ambitious Artificial Intelligence Project In The World Has Been Operating In Near-Secrecy For 30 Years
"We've been keeping a very low profile, mostly intentionally," said Doug Lenat, President and CEO of Cycorp. "No outside investments, no debts. We don't write very many articles or go to conferences, but for the first time, we're close to having this be applicable enough that we want to talk to you."
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+35 +8
Russia spends $775K on new Internet-scanning 'swear bot' to enforce ban on dirty words
Russia's anti-profanity law will be enforced by an Internet-scanning 'swear bot' armed to track down curse words in a language that has more than 1,200 ways to refer to male genitalia.
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+17 +2
Writing tips from the CIA’s ruthless style manual
Though the CIA may dissemble as a matter of course, it speaks plainly to policymakers and operations officers—its “customers,” in the language of the manual. The foreword begins, “Good intelligence depends in large measure on clear, concise writing. The information CIA gathers and the analysis it produces mean little if we cannot convey them effectively.”
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+15 +5
How Using Emoji Makes Us Less Emotional
And what linguists say it means if your smiley face has a nose.
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+17 +2
Down but Not Out: The Uncertain Future of the Crossword Puzzle
While the world warns of an impending print collapse, it might take down an innocent bystander with it—those little black and white squares that have long inhabited the back pages of newspapers and made themselves the primary Sunday-afternoon obsession of crossword nerds, for whom completing a puzzle is a bragworthy accomplishment.
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