Questions tagged [language]
The specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication.
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Do negative interactions with AI make us worse at interacting with people?
There have been a number of articles from credible sources suggesting that negative interactions with AI change the way that we interact with others. In each of the quotes below, I have added my own ...
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Did Francois Valentijn say that Malay language in 16th century was understood by even people living in Persia and beyond?
Utusan Malaysia, a mainstream newspaper publisher in Malaysia, published an article ( in Malay language) that claims that Malay language was a dominant and international language in 16th century. ...
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Did Burmese typewriters contain an upside-down character, which subsequently became proper typewriter style?
I was reading about the Internet Archive's work to archive the materials of a famous New York City typewriter family:
http://blog.archive.org/2020/08/26/an-archive-of-a-different-type/
I was ...
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Is Stanford's "Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative" real?
The Wall Street Journal claims that this document is a legitimate initiative of Stanford University.
It recommends, for example, that the term "blind study", widely used in experimental ...
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Did Reverend Mezzofanti fluently speak thirty-four languages?
In the John England's book titled "The Works of Reverend John England, Volume 6" (page 172) I read:
Reverend Joseph Mezzofanti, first keeper of the Vatican library, of whom Lord Byron had ...
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Is "Mu" a more common last name than "Xi" in China?
Is "Mu", which has a coronavirus variant named after it by the World Health Organization, a more common last name than "Xi", which the WHO has avoided naming a variant after?
...
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Are the ingredients listed in "Macbeth" common plants?
It is easy to find dozens of sites claiming, generally without attribution, that the ingredients in the famously gruesome witches' brew from Shakespeare's play Macbeth are herbalist jargon for common ...
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Is “Your Baby Can Read” effective and helpful?
I have seen these videos advertised online and on TV, and they make some pretty fantastic claims, showing kids as young as 2 reading complicated words. From what I can find online, it uses a ...
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In Sumerian and Akkadian, is the same word used for both ‘priest’ and ‘accountant’?
Johan Norberg in Open: The Story of Human Progress (2020) claims:
In Sumerian and Akkadian the same word is used both for ‘priest’ and ‘accountant’.
Is this true?
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Are Americans more likely to be monolingual?
From a comment on English Language & Usage, also mentioned in Wikipedia, and Chad Fowler's book The Passionate Programmer (Related blog post by the author: How Learning a Second Language Changed ...
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Can Rambo, the German shepherd, follow written commands?
An article on The Laughing Squid shows a German shepherd seemingly following written commands.
An impressively intelligent German shepherd named Rambo, who’s learning how to read with the help of ...
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Is “Lord Privy Seal” a technical term in documentary film making?
Richard Dawkins has claimed many times in public speeches, especially in reference to the documentary “Expelled”, that documentary filmmakers use the expression “Lord Privy Seal” in a disparaging ...
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Was the word 'racist' coined by Trotsky in 1927?
According to the image below, "racist is a made up word by Leon Trotsky in 1927."
I searched in the Online Etymology Dictionary and found that
racist (n.)
1932 [as a noun], 1938 as an ...
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Does using big words make people sound more professional?
I have read in several places that people use big, fancy, complicated, and little known words (such as Brobdingnagian) to give the impression that they are knowledgeable, smart, and professional. Does ...
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Is the use of X for unknown quantities taken from the Arabic word "shay"?
In this TED Talk, the speaker says that the use of X for unknown quantities was the result of Spanish people taking the Arabic word shay (meaning "thing"), which was used by Arabs to denote unknown ...
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Did Wario say a swear? [closed]
Ok, this would have been in like 2004-5 or so. I had some disk for gamecube with a set of bonus features including trailers, and there was one for WarioWorld, and I remember clearly hearing him say "...
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Is the origin of the phrase "suck it up" referring to WWII pilots?
I was reading this New Statesman article and was surprised to read this:
The origin of the phrase “suck it up” is quite gross. Allegedly, it’s what WWII pilots were instructed to do if they vomited ...
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Has Richard Dawkins never learnt a language other than English? [closed]
From a tweet quoted by The Independent in Richard Dawkins accused of Islamophobia after comparing 'lovely church bells' to 'aggressive-sounding Allahu Akhbar'
As a Christian from a mixed Christian-...
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Do people think in a language?
I was discussing some things with a psychology major, and he insisted that people always use a language to think. This is quite opposed to my own experience.
I agree that I am capable of formulating ...
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Did the head of the Joint National Committee on language claim Jesus spoke English?
In Bill Bryson's book The Mother Tongue, it is claimed, that Dr. David Edwards, head of the Joint National Committee on Languages once said: "If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for ...
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Does drinking alcohol improve foreign language skills?
An article in UK online newspaper The Independent has the following headline:
Alcohol can help foreign language skills
The article reports:
Dr Inge Kersbergen, from the University of Liverpool's ...
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Do Rohingyas speak in a Bengali dialect?
This page says they do.
Rohingyas are not Burmese. They called themselves as Rohingya. There
are no such people in Burmese history and census.
Rohingyas are in fact Bengali who speaks ...
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Is Arabic the 4th most common language used on internet?
The Wikipedia page, Languages user on the Internet provides two different ways of ranking the most popular languages on the Internet.
By content:
Estimated percentages of the top 10 million websites ...
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Does the F-word constitute a third of all swearing on the internet?
This youtube video (created as part of a series of short programmes for the UK's Channel Four television called Susie Dent's guide to Swearing) claims (around 3:08 in) that the word "fuck" makes up ...
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Can speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre navigate much better than Western speakers inside unfamiliar buildings?
Lera Boroditsky writes in the Edge article How does our language shape the way we think?:
Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying ...
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