Language

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Words, grammar and how people make meaning.

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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… Language5 min read 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… Language4 min read Why the most common word is twice as common as the next: Zipf's law Sort every word in a book from most to least common and a pattern appears: the top word is about twice as common as the second, three times as common as the… Language5 min read Why “The old man the boat” reads as broken: garden-path sentences Read this: The old man the boat. If it stalled you at the end, your brain did exactly what it always does: it guessed ahead and lost the bet. A garden-path… Language4 min read Why Spanish sounds faster than Vietnamese yet says just as much Listen to Spanish or Japanese and it seems to rush past; Vietnamese or Thai can sound almost unhurried. Yet when researchers timed 170 people reading the same… Language5 min read 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%… Language5 min read 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… Language5 min read