Have you felt that English wasn’t rationally constructed? Do you ever wonder, for instance, why we made “affect” and “effect” seem so similar when they mean two different things? Or why “you’re” are “your” sound identical, but are dissimilar in meaning? Couldn’t we have designed something little bit more simple? About two decades ago, a group in Washington, D.C. attempted to do just that.
Do you ever stop and look at the shape of our alphabet? Each letter looks natural to us now, but all those lines and circles have unique histories. It’s easy to make assumptions that our letters make sense, that they developed in some orderly logical way, and one reasonable assumption would be that P and R are related to each other based on their form.
At some point you’ve heard about the concept of language “families.” Generally, common sense defines how language relationships work: geographic neighbors often share a common ancestor. If this story were consistent, however, there wouldn’t be anything interesting for us to talk about. Take for example, this amazing discovery stemming from 20 years of research.
It seems like there’s always a new story on millions of passwords being hacked. Each attack feels personal, especially if you’re one of the many people that has one password across several sites, whether it’s Facebook or LinkedIn, e-mail or a bank account. And since one way hackers fish out passwords is by using a dictionary attack (a name that brings shame to the honorable
n 2012, Kraft Foods announced its new global snack business: Mondelez. According to the company, it’s pronounced “mon-dah-LEEZ.” If this sounds unfamiliar or simply odd, don’t doubt yourself: it is an invented word based on the Latin for world (mundus) and delicious. Despite that clever origin, the word still sounds funny, and it was not immediately well received. Who comes up with these names? Brand …
The Harvard Business Review recently reported that multinational corporations are encouraging—or mandating—their employees to speak English. Samsung, Airbus, Microsoft in Beijing and many others now enforce English as the language of their business. Even corporations that are based in foreign countries, like Renault in France and Rakuten in Japan, are mandating English
Like precious stones and tarot cards, flowers have symbolic meanings that only some understand. Different flowers represent sorrow, repentance, unrequited love, or beauty. Here are some of the most popular Mother’s Day flowers and their associated meanings. Do you know what these blooms are saying? Most of us appreciate flowers just because they are beautiful and not for their symbolic meanings, but this year you …
Have you heard the story of the Tower of Babel? According to the Bible, all of humanity lived together in harmony, until God decided to confuse the languages and spread the people across the Earth. This story points to one of the great mysteries of human culture: why do we all speak different languages? Our ancestors probably began using language between 200,000 to 50,000 years …
Earlier this year, French behavioral scientist Jonathan Grainger and his team taught baboons to read. Well, not exactly. They taught the baboons to recognize words. The baboons played a game on a computer screen. When a fake word appears, they were supposed to press a blue plus sign. When a real word shows up, they were supposed to press a green circle. The baboons were …
Think of when you’ve listened to someone speak Spanish or Japanese. Does it seem the words flow out very quickly, faster than other languages? Academics would agree with you. For the last decade, linguists have speculated that different languages are spoken at significantly different rates. The challenge has been how to measure the respective speeds.
A new study is so fascinating that we immediately wondered how it would apply to words. You, of course, are our greatest resource for insight. After you read about the experiment, help us think about how word meanings change depending on what else is going on around you.
There was no letter U in the alphabet. Well, that’s not the entire story. There was the sound for the letter we call U, but it didn’t look like U. It looked like V. The Classical Latin alphabet had only 23 letters, not the 26 that we have today. (This is why the W looks like a double V but is pronounced like a double …