It fascinates me how much we know about our languages and that we don’t know we know. Nobody taught us anything as babies and yet we could navigate, quite easily and effortlessly, our way inside the linguistic maze we were thrown into. The amount of rules you should know to speak a certain language is …
F***ing Insertion is Systematic, And This Is How It Works. Read More »
Like everything else, studying languages has its quirks. When you spend a lot of time unraveling the workings of language, you can’t help but develop some unique characteristics that set you apart from the rest of the herd. We mention below some signs that are typical of language majors and we hope you like them. …
Language is something we breathe in and out every moment of our lives. It is everywhere, everyone is exceptionally good at it. Yet, no one knows how it got into our heads. The number of sentences you can form with any given language is virtually infinite. It makes zero sense to say that we learn …
Here is how much time it would take to memorize every sentence in a language. Read More »
There is an interesting pattern that the word ‘tea’ shows across the globe. With very minor exceptions, the world has only two words for tea. One is like the English tea (e.g. thé in French, té in Spanish, and tee in Afrikaans). The other one is some variations of cha found in Arabic chay and …
Tea if by sea, Cha if by land: Why the world has only two words for tea. Read More »
| əz ju ər ˈriːdɪŋ ðɪs | ju ər parˈtɪsəˌpetɪŋ ɪn wʌn əv ˈneɪtʃərz ˈɡreɪtəst ˈwʌndərz | ˈlæŋɡwɪdʒ | ˈlæŋɡwɪdʒ ɪz ə ˈmɪrəkl̩ |ˈɪt ɪz ˈbaɪ ˈfɑːr ðə moʊst ˈpaʊərfəl ˈtuːl ðæt hjuː ˈmænəti hæz | ˈæftər ɔːl wɒt ˌdɪˈstɪŋɡwɪʃəz əz frəm ˈænəml̩z ɪz ðɪs ˈswi:t ˈlɪtl̩ ˈθɪŋ wi kɔ:l ˈlæŋɡwɪdʒ | ˈbaɪ dʒəst məˈnɪpjəˌletɪŋ ði ˈeər …
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” —Through the Looking Glass. Mr. Dumpty led down the most linguistic explanation of how words get their meanings. We, the people, assign what combinations of sounds we want to the …
Made-up Words That Sound So Cool They Should Actually Exist. Read More »
Languages have different phonetic inventories. Some languages use more sounds than others. A perceptually distinct sound unit is technically called a phoneme. Two sounds are different if they are perceived to constitute two distinct phonemes by native speakers. The following list ranks the most common languages by the number of sounds they use. It is …
These Are The Languages That Have The Most Sounds. Read More »
Not everything you know about language is true. When you study languages objectively, you start to realize that you’ve been wrong about almost everything you believed about them. Here is a list of some of the most common misconceptions about language that people have to reconsider:
There are approximately 7000 languages spoken in the world today, the majority of which are spoken by very tiny populations. About 60% of the world’s population, approximately 4 billion people, speak one of the few languages listed below. In fact, only 40 languages are spoken by more than 30 million native speakers. These languages are listed below …
The languages with more than 30 million native speakers. Read More »
Words really don’t have any logic to them. You can’t just work out the meaning of words based on the sounds that make them up. That’s because words are arbitrary. So if you don’t speak Chinese, you can’t possibly figure out the words for, say, “breakfast” or “fridge”. Different people agree to give different combinations of sounds different meanings. …
5 Words That Sound The Same In Almost Every Language. Read More »