Dyslexics invert and transpose letters because they confuse letters that look alike. The switching of b and d, for example, is very common because the letters are simply reflections of each other. (In fact, dyslexia is much more common for English readers than readers of other languages, like Italian, in which words are spelled phonetically more than they are in English.) CONTINUE READING »

Have you ever met someone and thought they were a little off? Just by the way someone speaks, we can pick up on social cues and emotional intelligence that give us certain impressions about them.

Communications researchers have taken this hunch to another level. They interviewed convicted murderers whose self-reported tests reveal them to be psychopaths and analyzed the specific language usage CONTINUE READING »

Back in the 1940s, mathematician Warren Weaver made an audacious suggestion: what if translation was not a feat of literary theory and linguistics, but one of cryptography? Weaver suggested treating a foreign text as if it were a code to be broken. (This theory was the early basis of machine translation, a subfield of computational linguistics.) This metaphor of foreign language as code means that statistics and other tools of cryptography can be used to translate CONTINUE READING »

Though these odd symbols—( ), [ ], { }, and ⟨ ⟩—regularly appear on our books and screens, they all have odd, unexpected origins. The most familiar of these unusual symbols is probably the ( ), called parentheses. One of them ( is called a parenthesis, and as a pair the plural are parentheses. Parenthesis literally means “to put beside” from the Greek roots par-, -en and thesis. Grammatically, they behave kind of like commas and serve to set aside a subordinate part of the sentence CONTINUE READING »

After years of research, the Archimedes’ Palimpsest is now on display at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. Like anything more than a thousand years old, it has an intriguing story to tell. But what’s a palimpsest? This confusing word has a very particular definition. A palimpsest is a text written on parchment, vellum or sometimes papyrus that is covered over by another text. The word palimpsest comes from the Ancient Greek word meaning “to scrape again.” CONTINUE READING »

In elementary school, we all learned the vowels of the English language: a, e, i, o, u and sometimes y. But what makes a vowel a vowel? Vowels and consonants are essentially two different categories of sounds that linguists use to better understand how language sounds work. The study of the sounds that human beings can produce is called phonetics. It’s a sub-speciality of linguistics. CONTINUE READING »

Though neurology has made great strides in the past two decades, the brain is still the least understood organ in the body. How does it make thoughts? Even though research has not yet answered that question, a few intrepid scientists think that we will soon be able to communicate with machines using only our minds.

A recent New York Times article explains that this ambitious project is CONTINUE READING »

The berry family is a linguistic invention particular to Germanic languages, like English. Other languages, like Spanish and French, do not combine the wide, diverse berry family into one group, but rather have very different words for blackberries, raspberries, blueberries and strawberries. The word berry comes from the Old English berie, which originally meant “grape.” As the English language spread to the Americas with colonization, many native grape-shaped fruits that grew CONTINUE READING »

Wherever we go on the internet, we encounter CAPTCHAs, those twisted words that block or enable entries on websites. Need to post an ad on Craigslist? There’s a CAPTCHA. Want to comment on an article or blog post? There’s a CAPTCHA. So why do we have them? They were invented to block spamming machines from posting wherever they want. In order to keep out spammers, a CAPTCHA has to effectively test if you are human or machine. CONTINUE READING »

American place names can sound pretty confusing even to native English speakers. From Philadelphia (Greek for “loving brother”) to Chicago (Algonquian Fox for “place of the wild onion”), the map of America is an etymological hodge-podge. For a clear example, take three adjacent states in New England. Vermont is an inverted, rough translation of the French for “green mountain,” mont vert. Massachusetts is derived from the name of the Native American people who lived CONTINUE READING »