Language
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Words, grammar and how people make meaning.
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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…
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…