Homophones, plurals, and language “rulescucks” are roiling prediction markets

Welcome to this week’s edition of Discovery Digest, a weekly roundup of the latest language-related news, research in linguistics, interesting reads from the week, and newest books and other media dealing with language and linguistics!

This week’s issue is shorter than usual because I was traveling last week and haven’t had a chance to catch up on the latest news yet. So I’ve given you some extra reading material in the This Week’s Reads section instead. Enjoy!

📢 Updates & Announcements

Announcements and what’s new with me and Linguistic Discovery.

The curse of knowledge (and what to do about it)

Last week I traveled to Williamsburg, VA to give the commencement speech for the linguistics department at the College of William & Mary (my alma mater). Since my remarks are (hopefully) useful for a broader audience, I thought I’d write up the transcript and share it here as well.

I also include a list of resources on careers in linguistics at the end of the article. If you’re majoring in linguistics or have a linguistics student in your life, be sure to send this their way!

The curse of knowledge (and what to do about it)

Inspiring words for linguistics majors

Linguistic DiscoveryDaniel W. Hieber, Ph.D.

🆕 New from Linguistic Discovery

This week’s content from Linguistic Discovery.

Here’s a little tidbit about the history of the letters ⟨I⟩ and ⟨J⟩:

Danny Hieber, Ph.D. (@linguisticdiscovery) on Threads

In Classical Latin, the letter ⟨I⟩ was used for both the /i/ sound (a vowel) and the /j/ sound (the consonant version of that vowel). The letter ⟨J⟩ developed as a variant of ⟨I⟩. At first the two were used interchangeably as versions of the same letter, but by the 1600s they had become distinct letters representing distinct sounds.

Threads

📃 This Week’s Reads

Interesting articles I’ve come across this week.

Language is hard—who knew?

Homophones, Plurals and Language ‘Rulescucks’ Are Roiling Prediction Markets

Bets decided on linguistic technicalities are exposing how hard it is to turn language into a binary market with payouts hinging on a single word.

BloombergChristopher Beam

When people share a space, their collective experience can sprout its own vocabulary, known as a familect:

Why We Speak More Weirdly at Home

When people share a space, their collective experience can sprout its own vocabulary, known as a “familect.”

The AtlanticKathryn Hymes

More and more Ukrainians are switching from speaking Russian to Ukrainian, but this trend long predates the Russian invasion of Ukraine:

In Russia’s war against Ukraine, one of the battlegrounds is language itself

The language question in Ukraine goes back centuries. It is deeply rooted in the history of old empires and Ukraine’s position as the borderland between the West and the East.

The ConversationOlga Maxwell

How English got its newest consonant, /ʒ/:

Meet English’s Newest Consonant

The slow emergence of a new sound in English speech, and what it evens means to be a sound ‘of a language’.

Danny Bate, Wanderer in Language HistoryDanny Bate

Colin Gorrie’s party trick is guessing the etymology of any word:

A bluffer’s guide to etymology

How to guess the age and origin of any English word

Dead Language SocietyColin Gorrie

More reads for this week:

• Why judges use dictionaries and grammars (National Review)
• Do birds have language? (Big Think)
• Can AI help humans talk to animals? Scientists say we’re getting closer to decoding their communication (Miami Herald)

What Language Do They Speak in India? - Rosetta Stone

What language do they speak in India? Hindi, Bengali, and Marathi are just three of hundreds to discover from India’s diverse linguistic landscape.

Rosetta StoneVerity Marques

How to invent a realistic language for fictional speakers

Linguists can mix, match or even break the rules of real-world languages to create interesting imaginary ones.

Science NewsMaria Temming

📚 Books & Media

New (and old) books and media touching on language and linguistics.

How to kill a language

Here’s a review of Sophia Smith Galer’s new book, How to kill a language: Power, resistance, and the race to save our words (Amazon | Bookshop):

Why the world’s languages are vanishing one by one

From Ladino to Emilian, thousands of dialects and languages are under threat. Can they be saved?

The TelegraphTim Smith-Laing

True color: The strange and spectacular quest to define color—from azure to zinc pink

Kory Stamper, author of Word by word: The secret life of dictionaries (Amazon | Bookshop), has a new book out! True color: The strange and spectacular quest to define color—from azure to zinc pink (Amazon | Bookshop). Here’s the publisher’s blurb:

begonia (n.): 3 -s :

a deep pink that is bluer, lighter, and stronger than average coral (see coral 3b), bluer than fiesta, and bluer and stronger than sweet william — called also gaiety

What could “bluer than fiesta” possibly mean? While editing dictionaries for Merriam-Webster, Kory Stamper found herself drawn again and again to the whimsical color definitions in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary—especially when compared to the dry and impersonal entries that filled the rest of the volume. Stamper couldn’t help but wonder: Who was the voice behind these peculiar definitions?

Meet I. H. Godlove, an erratic but brilliant up-and-coming scientist who was one of the experts Merriam-Webster hired in 1930 to help revise the dictionary to reflect a rapidly modernizing world. His fascinating life mirrors the wild and winding journey that color science, color psychology, and color production took through the twentieth century. Stamper tracks these industries as they move into the atomic age and intertwine in strange and surprising ways, spanning two world wars and involving chemical explosions, an unexpected suicide, dramatic office politics, and an extraordinary love story.

Filled with captivating facts about color words and colors themselves—did you know that the word “puke” used to refer to a fashionable shade of reddish-brown before it was associated with vomit?—and fueled by Stamper’s inexhaustible curiosity, True Color will transform the way you see the world, from black-and-white to Technicolor.

Order your copy here:

• Amazon
• Bookshop

👋🏼 Till next week!

Check out all the words that derive from Proto-Indo-European *(s)ker- ‘to cut’ in this infographic from Starkey Comics:

I always think it’s cool how skirt and shirt are related.

Also, I can’t resist noting one word that Ryan omitted from this infographic: shit!

Search ‘shit’ on etymonline

Search results for ‘shit’ on etymonline

etymonline

More details at Starkey Comics:

Etymological Tree of Sker - Starkey Comics

I started making an image showing how “skirt” and “shirt” are from the same origin, but got a bit carried away with all the other words also related. So here are 23 English words all from the Proto-Indo-European word “*(s)ker-” (‘to cut’). As a general rule: if a PIE word started with “sk”, and it […]

Starkey ComicsRyan Starkey