They’re reviled by spelling reformers, and loathed by English learners.
They’re silent letters. Why does English possess these orthographic curiosities? Do other languages put up with them? Are they useless leftover baggage, or could they be the quiet achievers that …
Not every language uses the same words for colours.
English has about 11 colour terms, while other languages get by with two or three. And it seems that people whose language uses different colour terms are able to easily tell …
Linguists and researchers are working on AusTalk — a database of Australian English.
With a thousand speakers, it will be the largest repository of English outside the UK. But what’s it for? What are we expecting to find? And how …
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 …
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 …
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?…
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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