The Great Vowel Shift And Other Reasons English Spelling Is So Weird

You Tube | Mental Floss

Dictionary Of Obscure Sorrows

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a compendium of invented words written by John Koenig. Each original definition aims to fill a hole in the language—to give a name to emotions we all might experience but don’t yet have a word for ... Watch the YouTube Series, with new episodes every other Sunday.

More here

European Word Translator

"CRAZY"

"CRIME"

"NONSENSE"

Type one or two lower-case English words to see translations via Google Translate.

Link to EWT via io9

The Noun Project

Fresh Collection

Click image to enlarge

The Noun Project is an ambitious effort to create a global visual language with open source symbols and icons. Anyone can contribute icons to the project’s online library, or download and use the icons, all free of charge. Icon users can pay a small fee to use icons without attribution (commercially or otherwise). The Noun Project periodically holds public icon creation workshops, or “iconathons.” The most recent iconathon was at the 2013 XOXO festival in Portland

Via Laughing Squid

Words And Phrases We Need To Resurrect

A "polar bear plunger"
experiences "curglaff."
Source

Snoutfair - a person with a handsome countenance.
The Word Museum: The Most Remarkable English Words Ever Forgotten by Jeffrey Kacirk. 

Pussyvan - a flurry, temper.
The Word Museum: The Most Remarkable English Words Ever Forgotten by Jeffrey Kacirk. 

Wonder-wench - a sweetheart.
The Word Museum: The Most Remarkable English Words Ever Forgotten by Jeffrey Kacirk. 

Lunting - walking while smoking a pipe. 
John Mactaggart’s Scottish Gallovidian Encyclopedia, 1824.

California widow - a married woman whose husband is away from her for any extended period. 
John Farmer’s Americanisms Old and New, 1889. 

Groak - to silently watch someone while they are eating, hoping to be invited to join them. www.ObsoleteWord.Blogspot.com

Jirble - to pour out (a liquid) with an unsteady hand: as, he jirbles out a dram. 
www.Wordnik.com

Curglaff - the shock felt in bathing when one first plunges into the cold water. 
John Jamieson’s Etymological Scottish Dictionary, 1808. 

Spermologer - picker-up of trivia, of current news, a gossip monger, what we would today call a columnist. 
The Word Museum: The Most Remarkable English Words Ever Forgotten by Jeffrey Kacirk.

Tyromancy - divining by the coagulation of cheese. 
The Word Museum: The Most Remarkable English Words Ever Forgotten by Jeffrey Kacirk. 

Beef-witted - having an inactive brain, thought to be from eating too much beef. 
John Phin’s Shakespeare Cyclopaedia and Glossary, 1902. 

Queerplungers - cheats who throw themselves into the water in order that they may be taken up by their accomplices, who carry them to one of the houses appointed by the Humane Society for the recovery of drowned persons, where they are rewarded by the society with a guinea each, and the supposed drowned person, pretending he was driven to that extremity by great necessity, is also frequently sent away with a contribution in his pocket. 
The Word Museum: The Most Remarkable English Words Ever Forgotten by Jeffrey Kacirk. 

Englishable - that which may be rendered into English. 
John Ogilvie’s Comprehensive English Dictionary, 1865.

Resistentialism - the seemingly spiteful behavior shown by inanimate objects. 
www.ObsoleteWord.Blogspot.com 

Bookwright - a writer of books; an author; a term of slight contempt. 
Daniel Lyons’s Dictionary of the English Language, 1897. 

Soda-squirt - one who works at a soda fountain in New Mexico. 
Elsie Warnock’s Dialect Speech in California and New Mexico, 1919.

With squirrel - pregnant. 
Vance Randolph’s Down in the Holler: A Gallery of Ozark Folk Speech, 1953.

Zafty - a person very easily imposed upon. 
Maj. B. Lowsley’s A Glossary of Berkshire Words and Phrases, 1888.

I must be bacon-witted.

Death and Taxes

Mrs. Jesus

AP Photo | Harvard University | Karen L. King

This is a fourth century fragment of papyrus that Harvard University professor Karen L. King says is the only existing ancient text that quotes Jesus explicitly referring to having a wife. King says the fragment of Coptic script is a copy of a gospel, probably written in Greek in the second century.

Christian Science Monitor

I can't remember; did Jesus have a last name? "Nazareth"? "Cohen"?

Monkey Monday | Chimpanzee Demonstrates Understanding Of Human Speech

Panzee | Discovery News

A 25-year-old chimpanzee named "Panzee" has just demonstrated that speech perception is not a uniquely human trait. Well-educated Panzee understands more than 130 English language words and even recognizes words in sine-wave form, a type of synthetic speech that reduces language to three whistle-like tones. This shows that she isn't just responding to a particular person's voice or emotions, but instead she is processing and perceiving speech as humans do.

"The results suggest that the common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans may have had the capability to perceive speech-like sounds before the evolution of speech, and that early humans were taking advantage of this latent ability when speech did eventually emerge," said Lisa Heimbauer who presented a talk today on the chimp at the 162nd Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in San Diego.

Heimbauer, a doctoral candidate and researcher at Georgia State University's Language Research Center, and colleagues Michael Owren and Michael Beran tested Panzee on her ability to understand words communicated via sine-wave speech, which replicates the estimated frequency and amplitude patterns of natural utterances. A few of the test words were "tickle," "M&M," "lemonade," and "sparkler."

Link via Monkeys in the News

Zuiikin' English | I Have A Bad Case Of Diarrhea

YouTube | Neatorama

Zuiikin' English [Eikaiwa Taisō Zuiikin' English] is a Japanese television series originally aired in 1992. Eikaiwa, Taisō and Zuiikin mean "English conversation", "gymnastic exercises" and "voluntary muscles", respectively. The 24-episode series combines English language lessons with gymnastic exercise. Topics include "Dating Tips", "Take Anything You Want - Spare Me My Life", and "How Dare You Say Such A Thing?"

For tomB

Monkey Monday | Koko Watches "Tea With Mussolini"

YouTube

Koko watches intently a DVD movie on her TV that she has seen several times before. It is called Tea with Mussolini. When it comes to a sad part, where the boy has to say goodbye to all of his relatives and waves goodbye on the train, Koko turns away from the TV. She then proceeds to sign: "Frown, sad, cry, bad, trouble, mother and Koko-love." Her eyes also look very watery. (Gorillas cry too.)

Lesson: There is mounting scientific evidence that great apes can feel empathy for others. This example points to the possibility that gorillas, in particular, may also be able to empathize with fictional human characters portrayed by actors—or at least be moved by them.

Paronomasia | Parrot Chute

Brooklyn Mutt

Commonly Misused And Misunderstood Words

Click image to enlarge

GrammarNet | Buzzfeed

My First Dictionary

Ross Horsely, the author of My First Dictionary, describes himself as a "timid librarian by day ... frenzied fan of gory slasher movies by night." His work reminds me of Edward Gorey's classic abecedarian poem, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, in which Gorey details the deaths of 26 children. My First Dictionary is my new guilty pleasure.

Link | Nag on the Lake

RSA | Language As A Window Into Human Nature

YouTube | RSA

Steven Pinker is a distinguished professor of psychology at Harvard University where he conducts research on language and cognition. Here he shows us how the mind turns the finite building blocks of language into infinite meanings.

The Codex Seraphinianus

The Codex Seraphinianus is a book written and illustrated by the Italian artist, architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini during thirty months, from 1976 to 1978. The book is approximately 360 pages long (depending on edition), and appears to be a visual encyclopedia of an unknown world, written in one of its languages, a thus-far undeciphered alphabetic writing.

The Codex is divided into eleven chapters, partitioned into two sections. The first section appears to describe the natural world, dealing with flora, fauna, and physics. The second deals with the humanities, the various aspects of human life: clothing, history, cuisine, architecture and so on. Each chapter seems to treat a general encyclopedic topic.

The illustrations are often surreal parodies of things in our world ... The writing system ... appears modelled on ordinary Western-style writing systems ... The language of the codex has defied complete analysis by linguists for decades. The number system used for numbering the pages, however, has been cracked ... It is a variation of base 21.

... Serafini has stated that the script of the Codex is asemic, that his own experience in writing it was closely similar to automatic writing, and that what he wanted his alphabet to convey to the 'reader' is the sensation that children feel in front of books they cannot yet understand, although they see that their writing does make sense for grown-ups.

SOURCE

View a video of the Codex below or download a copy here.


YouTube | The Anomalist

Anderson Cooper Dons Bunny Suit To Please Bonobos

YouTube | Gawker

Project Gutenberg

A roar of welkome through the welkin
Is certain proof you’ll find the Elk in;
But if you listen to the shell,
In which the Whelk is said to dwell,
And hear a roar, beyond a doubt
It indicates the Whelk is out.

Observe how Nature's necromancies
Have clearly painted on the Pansies,
These almost human counten-ances,
In yellow, blue and black nu-ances.
The face however seems to me
To be that of the Chim-pan-zee:
A fact that makes the gentle Pansy,
Appeal no longer to my fancy.

The Project Gutenberg EBook of How to tell the Birds from the Flowers and other Wood-cuts, by Robert Williams Wood. This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License.

Via Neatorama

The Idiom Dictionary

The Idiom Dictionary via The Presurfer

What You Hear Can Affect What You See

Can hearing a word change what one sees? Although visual sensitivity is known to be enhanced by attending to the location of the target, perceptual enhancements of following cues to the identity of an object have been difficult to find. Here, we show that perceptual sensitivity is enhanced by verbal, but not visual cues.

Participants completed an object detection task in which they made an object-presence or -absence decision to briefly-presented letters. Hearing the letter name prior to the detection task increased perceptual sensitivity. A visual cue in the form of a preview of the to-be-detected letter did not. Follow-up experiments found that the auditory cuing effect was specific to validly cued stimuli. The magnitude of the cuing effect positively correlated with an individual measure of vividness of mental imagery; introducing uncertainty into the position of the stimulus did not reduce the magnitude of the cuing effect, but eliminated the correlation with mental imagery.

Hearing a word made otherwise invisible objects visible. Interestingly, seeing a preview of the target stimulus did not similarly enhance detection of the target. These results are compatible with an account in which auditory verbal labels modulate lower-level visual processing. The findings show that a verbal cue in the form of hearing a word can influence even the most elementary visual processing and inform our understanding of how language affects perception.

Read the article at PLoS ONE

Via io9

Carbon & Water vs Silicon & Metal | IBM's "Watson"

For the last three years, I.B.M. scientists have been developing what they expect will be the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution -- “natural language,” as computer scientists call it -- and respond with a precise, factual answer. In other words, it must do more than what search engines like Google and Bing do, which is merely point to a document where you might find the answer. It has to pluck out the correct answer itself.

Technologists have long regarded this sort of artificial intelligence as a holy grail, because it would allow machines to converse more naturally with people, letting us ask questions instead of typing keywords. Software firms and university scientists have produced question-answering systems for years, but these have mostly been limited to simply phrased questions. Nobody ever tackled ["Jeopardy!"-type questions] because experts assumed that even for the latest artificial intelligence, the game was simply too hard: the clues are too puzzling and allusive, and the breadth of trivia is too wide.

With Watson, I.B.M. claims it has cracked the problem — and aims to prove as much on national TV. The producers of “Jeopardy!” have agreed to pit Watson against some of the game’s best former players as early as this fall.

Read more at The New York Times

Play the Watson Trivia Challenge

Thanks, Marc

Cultural Neuroscience

By now, it should come as no surprise when scientists discover yet another case of experience changing the brain. From the sensory information we absorb to the movements we make, our lives leave footprints on the bumps and fissures of our cortex, so much so that experiences can alter "hard-wired" brain structures. Through rehab, stroke patients can coax a region of the motor cortex on the opposite side of the damaged region to pinch-hit, restoring lost mobility; volunteers who are blindfolded for just five days can reprogram their visual cortex to process sound and touch.

Still, scientists have been surprised at how deeply culture—the language we speak, the values we absorb—shapes the brain, and are rethinking findings derived from studies of Westerners. To take one recent example, a region behind the forehead called the medial prefrontal cortex supposedly represents the self: it is active when we ("we" being the Americans in the study) think of our own identity and traits. But with Chinese volunteers, the results were strikingly different. The "me" circuit hummed not only when they thought whether a particular adjective described themselves, but also when they considered whether it described their mother. The Westerners showed no such overlap between self and mom. Depending whether one lives in a culture that views the self as autonomous and unique or as connected to and part of a larger whole, this neural circuit takes on quite different functions.

"Cultural neuroscience," as this new field is called, is about discovering such differences. Some of the findings, as with the "me/mom" circuit, buttress longstanding notions of cultural differences. For instance, it is a cultural cliché that Westerners focus on individual objects while East Asians pay attention to context and background (another manifestation of the individualism-collectivism split). Sure enough, when shown complex, busy scenes, Asian-Americans and non-Asian--Americans recruited different brain regions. The Asians showed more activity in areas that process figure-ground relations—holistic context—while the Americans showed more activity in regions that recognize objects.

Read more: Newsweek | 18 February 2010

Thanks, Marc