Linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin made the claim that there is no language in which a double positive implies a negative during a lecture. To which someone responded, “Yeah, yeah.”
language
In 1923 Illinois officially passed…
In 1923 Illinois officially passed legislation replacing English with ‘American’ as their official language, making it the only state in the Union where people legally ‘speak American’.
People whose mother language is…
People whose mother language is anumeric (a language that has no way of expressing arbitrary numbers) struggle to compare and remember the exact size of collections of as little as four objects. This suggests that numeric abilities are intrinsically related to linguistic abilities.
Up to 50% of young twins develop…
Up to 50% of young twins develop a secret language that can not be understood by others. The phenomenon is called cryptophasia and is thought to be created to communicate when one of the twins develop language slower than the other.
Facebook created two AI…
Facebook created two AI chatbots to converse with one other, only to shut them down when they began speaking in a language they had created for themselves.
Older forms of English…
Older forms of English kept Latin’s gender specific suffixes -tor and -trix, -tor is for men and -trix is for women. So a male pilot is a aviator and a female pilot is a aviatrix. A male fighter is a gladiator and a female fighter is a gladiatrix.
Since the 1300’s, the pronoun…
Since the 1300’s, the pronoun “thou” was actually considered more informal and even derogatory than the pronoun “you.” This is also why its usage began declining in the 17th century; it was considered “impolite.”
The common English-speaker has roughly…
The common English-speaker has roughly 50,000 words within their mind and generally finds the correct one in approximately 600 milliseconds.
Icelandic people actively work to eliminate…
Icelandic people actively work to eliminate English “loanwords” in their language by inventing and substituting new words from Old Icelandic and Norse roots.
The “Pirate speak” from movies and books was an actual…
The “Pirate speak” from movies and books was an actual distinct dialect of English which was spoken until the 19th century in the west country. It became associated with pirates due to the strong seafaring tradition from the area.