Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics
open.spotify.com
“It is easier to paint a bowl of fruit than a horse race, easier to describe the structure of dead plants and animals than a living ecology, and easier to describe the abstract structures of idealized, homogeneous languages in isolation than the actual linguistic behavior of living humans.”
The Interpreter
newyorker.com
language is both endlessly regenerative and curiously circular.
Susie Dent • Dent's Modern Tribes: The Secret Languages of Britain
Dictionary dump (unformatted): a/an : “A was modified from the Egyptian hieroglyph representing the eagle. In Hebrew it was an ox, and in Greek it was a “symbol of a bad AUGURY in the sacrifices.” The distinction between a/an happened around the 1300s. aardvark : South African “earth pig” aaron’s serpent : “something so powerful as to swallow up
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Gordon surmised that the Pirahã provided support for a controversial hypothesis advanced early in the last century by Benjamin Lee Whorf, a student of Sapir’s. Whorf argued that the words in our vocabulary determine how we think. Since the Pirahã do not have words for numbers above two, Gordon wrote, they have a limited ability to work with... See more