Language
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Words, grammar and how people make meaning.
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Why Russians have two blues: how a colour word can speed up your eyes
Russian has two basic words for blue, goluboy (light) and siniy (dark), and in a 2007 experiment Russian speakers were about 124 milliseconds faster at telling…
Why a sentence can nest forever on paper but not in your head: centre-embedding
The rat the cat the dog chased killed ate the malt. It is perfectly grammatical, and almost nobody can read it. English lets you tuck one clause inside another…
Why Latin p became English f: Grimm's law and the sound-shift chain
Latin says pes, English says foot. Latin tres, English three. Latin cornu, English horn. The swap is not random: when the Germanic languages split off, their…
Why English plurals say s, z or iz: the wug test
Say 'cats' and 'dogs' out loud and listen to the last sound. One is a hiss, the other a buzz, and 'buses' adds a whole extra syllable. English spells all three…
Why the same sound is a b to English ears and a p to Spanish ears
Say "bat" and "pat". The only physical difference is a tiny delay between your lips opening and your vocal cords buzzing, about 12 milliseconds for an English…
Why everyone agrees which blob is 'bouba' and which is 'kiki'
Show people a soft blob and a spiky star and ask which one is bouba and which is kiki. The words are made up, yet in the classic version of the test about 95%…
Why the most common words are the shortest: Zipf's two laws of language
Count the words in almost any long text and a strange pattern appears: the most common word turns up about twice as often as the second, three times as often…
Why English spelling doesn't match how words sound
Around 1400, English spelling roughly matched speech. Bite sounded close to "beet", meet roughly like "mate", and house like "hoose". Then, over about three…