Content tagged with “language” under “The Interesting List”

“ A specialized branch of crime investigation using writing patterns to solve crimes. ”

“ In 1972, an Italian singer recorded a song which lyrics that were meant to sound like English, but were in fact nonsense. He sought to prove that Italians would love anything that sounded like English. ”

“ There is a sentence that uses every phonetic sound which differences between British and American English. Hugh Jackson says it before each take in which he has to play an American. ”

“ Japanese-speakers imitate English-speakers without speaking English, showing how they interpret the inflections, tone, and cadence (and often hand movements) of the Anglo world. ”

“ U.S. anthropologists will sometimes refer to ‘America/American’ by another word in order to maintain professional distance and objectivity from it. ”

“ The Cambodian language is notoriously hard to type. So the speakers just…don’t. ”

“ It turns out that ‘macaroni’ was a state of mind. ”

“ There is a simplified version of English, consisting of just 850 words. After World War II, it was promoted as a universal language for the entire world. ”

“ There is a standard written notation to describe juggling patterns and techniques, much like written music and written chess moves. ”

“ An infographic showing the background and history behind the names of all the major candy bars and snacks. ”

“ There’s a standard body of text which is used by linguists and speech pathologists to assess and compare accents when read out loud. ”

“ Examples of when missing or extra commas became painful legal judgments. ”

“ Japan escaped serious effects from both SARS and COVID. There’s a theory that this is because speaking Japanese outputs less air from the speaker’s mouth. ”

“ This is an official term for ‘the variety of English natively spoken, particularly in urban communities, by most working- and middle-class African Americans.’ ”

“ Newspaper headlines have informal language conventions called ‘headlinese’ that constitute a new and different dialect. ”

“ A screencast history of the Wikipedia page for the heavy metal umlaut which traces how the page was developed and changed over time. ”

“ A librarian in upstate New York was the first to bring the Internet into libraries and coined the term ‘surfing’ to describe browsing the internet. ”

“ A video showing some common verbal riffs from various Aaron Sorkin shows. ”