Author: Daniel Midgley (page 38 of 41)

37: Gadafi or Khaddhaffy?

30 August 2011 / / Comments Off on 37: Gadafi or Khaddhaffy?

Recent events in Libya have us wondering: How do you write Khadafi?

There are at least 96 permutations on his last name alone, and this causes problems for writers and search engines alike. How do we put Arabic script …

36: Go the Fuck to Sleep

16 August 2011 / / Comments Off on 36: Go the Fuck to Sleep

On every frazzled parent’s reading list is a new children’s book: Go the Fuck to Sleep by Adam Mansbach.

Perhaps you wouldn’t read it to a child, but you might wonder where the f-word comes from, and why we can …

35: Americanisms

9 August 2011 / / Comments Off on 35: Americanisms

Are you plagued by Americanisms?

Some people get irritated by words or phrases invented or popularised by speakers of American English. But many of the Americanisms that are twisting people’s knickers (or panties) aren’t American. What’s behind this cross-continental scuffle?…

34: Neanderthals

2 August 2011 / / Comments Off on 34: Neanderthals

Recent work in genetics has revealed that all non-African people are related to Neanderthals, a now-extinct species of human.

If there was interbreeding between us, how would they have communicated? Did Neanderthals have language, and what might it have been …

33: Weird Words (featuring Rod L. Evans)

26 July 2011 / / Comments Off on 33: Weird Words (featuring Rod L. Evans)

Are you a word maven? Have you ever used an aglet? Do you know where to find an octothorpe?

These and other words are lurking in your dictionary, and they’ve been brought to light in a new …

32: Birdsong Syntax

19 July 2011 / / Comments Off on 32: Birdsong Syntax

Do bird songs have grammar?

Linguists have supposed that syntactic structure was only found in human language, but now a team of researchers is finding that finches use it in their songs. Does that mean they speak a kind of …

31: Who Wrote the Bible?

12 July 2011 / / Comments Off on 31: Who Wrote the Bible?

Scholars have long supposed that certain books of the Bible were written by a number of different authors.

Now a team of language researchers is using computers to determine Bible authorship, and they’re coming up with some surprising findings. Can …

30: Swedish Pronouns and Gender

5 July 2011 / / Comments Off on 30: Swedish Pronouns and Gender

An equality-minded preschool in Sweden is avoiding the use of gender-specific pronouns like he and she, and referring to the kids as friends, rather than girls and boys.

Is this linguistic egalitarianism, or radical language engineering? Does using gendered …

29: Time in Amondawa (featuring Chris Sinha)

28 June 2011 / / Comments Off on 29: Time in Amondawa (featuring Chris Sinha)

We’re used to treating time as though it were space: we move through the day, we look back on the past, and we look forward to the future.

But what if we didn’t use such metaphors? What would that say …

28: Spying for Metaphor

21 June 2011 / / Comments Off on 28: Spying for Metaphor

The US intelligence agency IARPA is putting a heavy research focus, not into lie detection or speech recognition, but metaphor.

That’s right, the figure of speech where you describe something as something else. But why would that be useful for …

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