Such a wonderful video about English spelling and pronunciation.
https://youtu.be/Im0x7ftV6Mw?si=mIAw71EO73YAoX8W
#English #language #linguistics

A quotation from Anthony Burgess

Languages never stand still. Modern spelling crystallizes lost pronunciations: the visual never quite catches up with the aural.

Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) English novelist
A Mouthful of Air: Language, Languages … Especially English, ch. 21 “Sounds from the Past” (1992)

More about this quote: wist.info/burgess-anthony/7114…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #burgess #anthonyburgess #artifact #evolution #language #linguistics #orthography #passageoftime #pronunciation #spelling #timelag

Ancient language diversity peaked before expanding empires began a long global decline

Around 7,500 languages are spoken or signed across the world today. A new study suggests this number is far lower than in the past. Researchers estimate Earth held tens of thousands of languages between 3,000 and 1,000 years ago before a long period of language loss began...

More info: https://archaeologymag.com/2026/07/ancient-language-diversity-before-expanding-empires/

Follow @archaeology

#archaeology #archeology #archaeologynews #AncientLanguages #linguistics

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Ancient language diversity peaked before expanding empires began a long global decline

I am trying something new on Substack.

https://substack.com/@brywillis634737/note/c-306413015?r=pvxh5&utm_source=notes-share-action&utm_medium=web

I’ve been working on an essay about understanding.

The premise is simple enough: LLMs are routinely described as subhuman because, among other alleged deficiencies, they lack consciousness and don’t understand.

#philosophy #language #understanding #linguistics #llms #aidebate #artificialintelligence #blog #podcast #substack #essay #preview #criticalanalysis #consciousness #meaning

📜 TIL the Korean alphabet Hangul is the only major writing system invented from scratch for its own language, and its letters are drawings of your mouth.

King Sejong the Great finished it in 1443 so common people could read and write. The consonants literally trace the speech organs: ㄱ is the tongue root blocking the throat, ㅁ is lips pressed together, ㅅ is the teeth.

The vowels encode sky, earth, and human: a dot, a horizontal line, and a vertical stroke.

The scholar class hated it. For 400 years it was treated as a script for women, monks, and commoners, until it went mainstream in the late 1800s. Hangul Day is now a national holiday in South Korea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Hangul

#linguistics #history #korea

This sequence is intended as a conceptual decomposition:

world event or stimulus → salience → attention → embodied presentation → perception or event construction → apprehension as ‘an experience’ → conceptual framing → verbal representation

https://brywillis634737.substack.com/p/before-the-word-the-model
#philosophy #language #experience #video #blog #substack #mind #perception #linguistics #determinism #thought #realism #reality #consciousness #vocabulary #cognition #biology #speech #mediation #model #neuroscience #flow #cognitive

I had to stop myself from blurting out the answer to a Coptic decipherment challenge the professor gave us and give others a chance to check the chart

#linguistics

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xkcd "quartz of course" meme template: Writing systems are second nature to us Bronze Age nerds, so it's easy to forget that the average person probably only knows one or two syllabaries and the Chinese radicals. And Greek, of course. Of course.

OUT NOW | 'Verbal Multi-Word Expressions in Corpus Languages' edited by Victoria Fendel

The latest book in the Papers of the Philological Society series brings together a diverse, interdisciplinary cohort of scholars to shed new light on verbal multi-word expressions in corpus languages such as Greek, Latin, and Egyptian.

Read freely or buy online: https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0478

#OpenAccess #Linguistics

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The hardback book on a colourful background alongside text that says: Verbal Multi-Word Expressions in Corpus Languages, edited by Victoria Beatrix Fendel This volume brings together a diverse, interdisciplinary cohort of scholars to shed new light on verbal multi-word expressions in corpus languages such as Greek, Latin, and Egyptian. Addressing, in particular, corpora related to in-groups, which are often overlooked due to entrenched research traditions or limited accessibility, the volume makes these corpora newly visible and methodologically relevant. Drawing on expertise from linguistics, computer science, papyrology, and Egyptology, Verbal Multi-Word Expressions in Corpus Languages explores both the theoretical and practical dimensions of studying verbal multi-word expressions, including cutting-edge digital solutions. Grounded in original data, the research pushes beyond current boundaries, advancing typological understanding and methodological precision.

This morning I awoke thinking about sex – actually gender – of borrowed Latin words. Get your mind out of the gutter.

👉 https://brywillis634737.substack.com/p/we-still-bury-the-dead

I wrote a piece about it, but I was truly conflicted on my journey, especially as I compared English and French approaches, and a potential feminist rift.

#philosophy #language #sociolinguistics #etymology #english #french #latin #gender #writing #culture #feminism #linguistics #reform #administration

A Necessary History of the Oddest Letter: W

Danny Bate on the Linguistic History of Our Alphabet

https://lithub.com/a-necessary-history-of-the-oddest-letter-w/?utm_source=Klaviyo&utm_medium=campaign&utm_id=01KVZ90JA55X1GY58PKNE4348H&_kx=3MZUehzXM-41qlWAMPUiuNZadX2p0SByuNf_t0eMLB0.U5D8ER

Books about Linguistics at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=linguistics+

#books #literature #linguistics

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Letter W San-serif shown in Neue Helvetica 48 pt.. Serifs shown in Bodoni 48 pt.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W#/media/File:Latin_alphabet_Ww.svg

YAKAMOZ (Turkish):
The reflection of the moon on the surface of the water.While pop-linguistics books often frame this purely as a romantic, untranslatable word for moonlight, its scientific and historical roots are even more fascinating.

#Linguistics
#Etymology
#Bioluminescence
#Nature
#Language
#Words
#photography
#StarTrails
#AltText

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A long-exposure night photograph by Mark Stewart capturing a dramatic coastal landscape filled with glowing bioluminescence and star trails. The vertical composition looks down onto a rugged, rocky coastline where sharp stone ledges and cliffs jut out into the ocean. The water directly colliding with these rocky shores glows with a vibrant, electric neon-blue light, caused by bioluminescent organisms activated by the motion of the waves. In contrast to the glowing blue water below, the night sky above is captured in a long exposure, filling the upper half of the frame with hundreds of white, parallel star trails arcing diagonally across the sky. Along the horizon, a warm, golden-orange glow from a setting moon or distant light illuminates the silhouette of distant mountains and the dense evergreen forest lining the clifftops. The smooth, misty texture of the ocean water creates a serene, ethereal atmosphere that bridges the glowing sea and the streaking stars.

What can we say about trust and guilt? Not as much as we might think.

https://open.substack.com/pub/brywillis634737/p/guilty-as-charged?r=pvxh5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=masto&showWelcomeOnShare=true

#philosophy #language #substack #blog #metaethics #ethics #epistemology #linguistics #law #legaltheory #guilt #semantics #truth #wittgenstein #speech

I offer some linguistic clarification on the misogyny implied in the image.

https://substack.com/profile/43480121-bry-willis/note/c-277455068?r=pvxh5&utm_source=notes-share-action&utm_medium=masto

Spoiler alert: there is none. Whether this is language-splaining or mansplaining is up to you.

NB: Evidently, LinkedIn already censored this image, but in a new context, we'll see what happens.

#philosophy #language #linguistics #pangolins #musk #misogyny #substack #response #note #censorship #speech #blog

Hexlish Alphabet for English, Constructed Languages and Cryptography: Automatic, Structural Compression with a Phonetic Hexadecimal Alphabet

DOI : https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13139469

Hexlish is a legible, sixteen-letter alphabet for writing the English language and for encoding text as legible base 16 or compressed binary. Texts composed using the alphabet are automatically compressed by exactly fifty percent when converted from Hexlish characters into binary characters. Although technically lossy, this syntactic compression enables recovery of the correct English letters via syntactic reconstruction. The implementer can predict the size of the compressed binary file and the size of the text that will result from decompression. Generally it is intuitive to recognize English alphabet analogues to Hexlish words. This makes Hexlish a legible alternative to the standard hexadecimal alphabet.

#Hexlish #Conlang #Alphabets #English #Hexadecimal #Encoding #Cryptography #Ciphers #Crypto #Encryption #Compression #Papers #Preprints #Orthography #Language #Linguistics #Writing #Glyphs #Alphabetology #Technology

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Hexlish Alphabet logo. The word HEXLISH in rainbow colors on a black background with a hexagonal dot above the letter I. Beneat the logo in yellow reads the phrase, "English Text Compression & Encoding."

In the linked paper, Carl D. Franklin digs deep into the history of the tetragrammaton and debunks some of the myths commonly accepted as fact. The paper is part of a series and well worth the read for anyone interested in textual criticism or translation.

PDF: https://www.cbcg.org/franklin/debunking2.pdf

SYNOPSIS

"Is it true that the name Jehovah borrowed its vowels from Adonai?"

Spoiler: No, it is not true. It is a fabrication of a false history. The pronunciation, JEHOVAH was used centuries before Galatinus, so it is impossible for him to have invented it. Moreover, there is a lack of historical evidence that medieval scholars before Galatinus accepted any pronunciation other than JEHOVAH. They all appear to have unanimously supported this one widely known pronunciation of the tetragrammaton.

A lot of religious and textual myths have resulting in mass misconceptions about biblical textual history and meaning. Some of the myths misrepresent the tetragrammaton, or the name of God. This eventually led to the creation of the artificial name, Yahweh, which is not a Hebrew word, and is in fact a cleverly disguised classical Latin name for Jove. The author defrocks the Galatinus origin myth, proving the name JEHOVAH was in use long before Galatinus.

The sacred name mythos is popular in some Christian and Jewish sects as well as among the Hebrew Roots movement. This paper exposes some of the false history and baseless assertions about the pronunciation of the tetragrammaton. As it turns out, the early Masoretes and some early Catholics and the later Reformers had gotten it right - JEHOVAH is the correctly preserved pronunciation of the name of God. The name was never 'lost' and it has been known all through recorded history, if even only by a few.

#Bible #MasoreticText #Translation #Theology #History #Philology #Myths #SacredNames #NominaSacra #Judaism #Christianity #Hebrew #TiberianHebrew #Language #Linguistics

@infostorm@a.gup.pe @academicchatter@a.gup.pe @translators@a.gup.pe @theology@a.gup.pe @religion@a.gup.pe @histodons@a.gup.pe