It’s been almost three months since the last collection of language links: definitely time for another. There are lots, so get comfy and don’t read them all at once.
The Historical Thesaurus of English is now online. Bookmark this one.
A lovely language family tree.
The outstanding Psycho Babble blog winds down.
How to draw syntax trees.
16thC manuscript of very ornamental calligraphy.
Family communication.
Bats jam each other’s sonar.
The improbable muses of 18thC poets.
To Siri, with love. From the mother of an autistic boy.
Ireland’s Book Show meets Clive James.
The rapid evolution of emoji.
Begging the question of acceptability.
Language features that English could do with.
The role of language in the Hong Kong protest movement.
Korean is diverging into two languages.
Get one’s goat is an etymological mystery.
Linguists’ thoughts on vape.
The purposes of language.
An antidote to terrible grammar quizzes.
A comparative library of Beowulf translations.
Search word use and trends in thousands of films and TV shows.
What happens in the brains of simultaneous interpreters.
Why we have so many terms for ‘people of colour.’
Inversion and fronting in English syntax.
Nigga? Please.
The history of the chapter.
In praise of mechanical pencils.
Notes on translation.
US/UK English ‘untranslatables’.
The dangerously dull language of TTIP.
On accent diversity in the UK, and the status of RP.
How prehistory – the idea and the word – developed.
Swedish Sans, a new national typeface.
The history of football’s rabona.
11 facts about the umlaut.
An interview with Steven Pinker on style.
The art of theatre captioning.
The internet is no barometer of illiteracy.
Words for book around the world.
Chirping, popping, humming, blaring. The sounds fish make.
A linguist decodes restaurant menus.
Affirming the origins of yes.
A brief history of typeface naming.
Language is fundamentally communal.
The languages shaping the world’s economy.
A new database of Saints in Scottish Place-Names.
Language use is gloriously complex, not gloriously simple.
The acronyms that aren’t.
How -isms became -phobias. On the framing of oppression.
A history of women changing their names, or not, in marriage.
What’s wrong with ‘America’s Ugliest Accent’.
The secret life of passwords.
The etymology of allergy and related words.
Research suggests the sleeping brain can understand words.
A brief bibliography of -ass as a colloquial intensifier.
Slang often has old and venerable roots.
How English became the language of science.
A new living dictionary for British Sign Language (BSL).
Finally, a short animated video on language evolution:
Want more? I’ll try not to wait so long till the next batch. In the meantime, you can always browse the language links archive at Sentence first.
Filed under: etymology, language, language history, linguistics, link love, words, writing Tagged: accents, etymology, language, language history, linguistics, links, naming, poetry, translation, usage, words, writing
