If you’ve ever tried to tackle the monumental task of learning Quenya or Sindarin, then rejoice: The man who created them agrees with you that they’re bloody hard to get your head around. Yes, The Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien never expected people to be able to speak Elvish fluently.
Today is a good day to learn. Duolingo has officially launched its Klingon language course, meaning Star Trek fans everywhere can teach themselves how to speak with honor.
One of the more complicated and interesting questions on everyone’s mind immediately after the very first Black Panther trailer dropped focused on the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Wakandan accent—specifically about why various character’s accents seemed to be so different from one another. We now have an answer.
The Star Wars galaxy is a weird and wondrous place, full of laser swords, aliens, and sentient robots. This can make trying to depict the banality of life there a bit difficult. So over years of tie-in material, writers have had to come up with oodles of new words to make the normal things people encounter in everyday…
Since its discovery over a hundred years ago, the 240-page Voynich manuscript, filled with seemingly coded language and inscrutable illustrations, has confounded linguists and cryptographers. Using artificial intelligence, Canadian researchers have taken a huge step forward in unraveling the document’s hidden meaning.
At 26 letters long, the English alphabet isn’t the most complicated string of symbols and characters to master, even for a five-year-old. But that’s because it has been put on a strict diet over the years that helped it slim down and shed 10 additional letters that were either deemed superfluous, redundant, or just…
Moana made global history by being Disney’s first feature-length film to center on a Polynesian princess, drawing inspiration from the legends of multiple South Pacific Ocean cultures. In New Zealand, though, the movie’s connecting with local audiences of Maori descent in a unique and important way.
The number zero is something we all take for granted, yet its conceptual origin has eluded archaeologists and historians. An updated analysis of an ancient Indian manuscript is shedding new light on this longstanding mystery, showing that the symbol that would eventually evolve into the number zero emerged at least…
According to emails obtained by The Guardian, staff at the USDA have been informed that they should change their language when referring to climate change. Specifically, the staff at the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) were told to avoid using the phrase “climate change,” and were instructed to alter…
Come to UC Berkeley for the chance to study Game of Thrones’ beloved fictional languages with the linguist who helped create them, stay for the absurd hilarity that is the university’s fight song, delivered as a Dothraki war cry. No, really.
Iceland has long had a progressive outlook on technology. It’s regularly high on lists of the best countries for data privacy, the Pirate Party has a substantial place in its government, and it was the headquarters of Wikileaks for a long time. But Icelanders are currently concerned that their native language could go…
If you often get the feeling there just aren’t enough hours in the day, then the lunch break your bosses should generously afford you could be one opportunity to make more of your time (and it beats listening to co-workers talking about sports you don’t watch). Give yourself thirty minutes a day five days a week and…
You have to strike while the iron is hot. You can’t have too many irons in the fire. It has a nice ring to it. Go at something hammer and tongs. These are all idioms that have origins in blacksmithing, so Scott Wadsworth of Essential Craftsman decided to literally show us what all those idioms look like when…
If you want to ensure your files are safe, it’s a good idea to back them up in multiple places. And that’s the basic idea behind the Rosetta Wearable Disc. Printed in microscopic text on one side is an archive of 1,000 different human languages used in 2016. By producing multiple copies, language enthusiasts can…
You know that thing you do where you talk to your dog like it’s a baby? New research shows that puppies respond well to this silly form of speech, but older dogs could give a crap. So, stop doing it when your dog grows up.
New research shows that macaques have a vocal tract capable of emitting human-like speech, but they lack the brain circuitry to make words happen. That may be a good thing, because their simulated speech is creepy as hell.
If you’ve ever been to a foreign country where you don’t speak the language, you know that an inability to communicate can be frustrating, if not a bit scary. But in Arrival, when 12 shell-shaped UFOs land across the world, everything seems to hinge on the skills of Amy Adams’ linguistics expert, Louise—just as the…
South Park is unabashedly vulgar. The language can be crude and the action is sometimes, um, a little much—but the comedy is biting, the issues are relevant, and it’s done so much to change what television looks and sounds like today. Kaptain Kristian dives into how the language of a cartoon could affect reality and…
Things can get lost in translation, especially when something is translated to a foreign language and then translated back to the original language. Like movie titles. The Czech Republic can really get loose and wild with the names for American movies, and finding out what some popular movies are called over there is…
