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Posts: 11
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Physics and linguistics notes on the formation of the vocabulary for quantum theory
Published: March 25, 2025 13:50
[This is a guest post by Conal Boyce] Exactly what had become ‘visualizable’ according to Heisenberg in 1927, and whence the term ‘Blurriness Relation’ in lieu of Uncertainty Principle? As backdrop for the physics concepts and associated German vocabulary…
geheuer und Ungeheuer
Published: March 24, 2025 15:22
Two years ago, I wrote a post about "kempt and sheveled" (3/26/23). That elicited the following offline comment by a German friend: When I was a grad. student (Indology, linguistics) at Erlangen-Nürnberg in the late 60s, we used to joke about the same…
Decipherment of the Indus script: new angles and approaches, part 2
Published: March 22, 2025 17:26
In the first part of this inquiry, I stressed the connection between Mesopotamian and Indus Valley (IV) civilizations. My aim was to provide support for a scriptal and lingual link between the undeciphered IV writing system and the well-known languages…
A simple forks or no question
Published: March 22, 2025 08:57
A recent achievement of helpful Google AI — Anna Brown, "How a glitch in an online survey replaed the word 'yes' with 'forks'", Decoded 3/21/2025: At Pew Research Center, we routinely ask the people who take our surveys to give us feedback about their…
American diplomat in Hong Kong reciting a Tang poem in Cantonese
Published: March 21, 2025 22:11
王維 (699-761 鳥鳴澗 人閒桂花落 夜靜春山空 月出驚山鳥 時鳴春澗中 wong4 wai4 niu5 ming4 gaan3 yan4 haan4 gwai3 fa1 lok6 ye6 jing6 cheun1 saan1 hung1 yut6 cheut1 geng1 saan1 niu5 si4 ming4 cheun1 gaan3 jung1 Wang Wei The Warble Ravine At peace, […]
The origin of human language: cognition and communication
Published: March 20, 2025 00:02
We touched upon this question recently in "Chicken or egg; grammar or language" (1/15/25), where we examined Daniel Everett's thesis as propounded in How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention. In that volume, Everett argues that…
Laying duck
Published: March 19, 2025 12:47
Jackie M. sent a link to an instance of a new eggcorn — "laying duck" for "lame duck": Schumer had just written his political epitaph. Now, he is a laying duck in the Senate. New York, you must force him to resign and start shopping for a new senator. —…
Words for "library" in Sanskrit: the future of information science
Published: March 19, 2025 10:11
The words that leap to mind are pustakālaya पुस्तकालय (pustak पुस्तक ["book"] + ālaya आलय ["place"]) and granthālaya ग्रन्थालय (granth ग्रंथ ["text"] + ālaya आलय ["place"]). Those are simple and straightforward. There were several other Sanskrit words for…
Plummet's journey
Published: March 18, 2025 12:32
Yann LeCun's evaluation of political versus linguistic errors: View on Threads His comment is no doubt meant as a joke, but it's worth exploring the usage that bothers him. To start with, the English word plummet has already been on a long…
Erin go Bragh
Published: March 18, 2025 01:18
I've been saying "Erin go Bragh" my whole life and knew that it meant roughly "Ireland Forever!". It's actually an anglicized version of the Irish language phrase "Éire go brách" or "Eire go bráth," which may be translated as "Ireland till doomsday". The…
Phonemic analysis of animal sounds as spelled in various popular languages
Published: March 17, 2025 10:31
This is something I've been waiting for for decades: "Onomatopoeia Odyssey: How do animals sound across languages?", by Vivian Li, The Pudding (March, 2025) For many, our first memories of learning animal sounds include the song “Old MacDonald Had a…