Skeptophilia

Sometimes I have thoughts that blindside me. The last time that happened was a couple of days ago, while I was working in my office and our ...

My master's degree is in historical linguistics, and one of the first things I learned was that it's tricky to tell if two words are...

The southern tip of mainland Italy is called Calabria.  It's a strikingly beautiful place, containing three national parks ( Pollino Nat...

I've written here before about the monumental difficulty of translating written text when you (1) don't know what the character-to-s...

We were having dinner with our younger son a while back, and he asked if there was a common origin for the - naut  in astronaut  and the nau...

A recent study found that regardless how thoroughly AI-powered chatbots are trained with real, sensible text, they still have a hard time r...

An Introduction to Language  (by Victoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman, Third Edition, 1974) defines language  as "rule-governed arbitrary...

British science historian James Burke has a way of packing a lot of meaning into a small space. I still recall the first time I watched his...

My master's thesis is titled, "The Linguistic Effects of the Viking Invasions on England and Scotland," which should put it in...