iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 22h

What if English never adopted Latin names for months? From @StarkeyComics.bsky.social

Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 01/10/2026

Why people feel entitled to correct your grammar online: A natural history of the language police @ColinGorrie.bsky.social of the Dead Language Society newsletter explains how the unique nature of the history of English gave rise to grammar pedants open.substack.com/pub/colingor...

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 01/10/2026

Want to learn more about the history of the alphabet? Don’t miss Danny Bate’s @DannyBate.com awesome book, “Why Q needs U: A history of our letters and how we use them”: Amazon: amzn.to/4myXr6X Bookshop: bookshop.org/a/110785/978...

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 01/10/2026

A similar term developed for the names of the Germanic runic alphabets: The Scandanavian runes were called “futhark”, taken from the names of the first six letters of the script: ⟨F, U, Þ, A, R, K⟩ (the letter thorn ⟨Þ⟩ represented a “th” /θ/ sound).

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 01/10/2026

The word “alphabet” comes from the names of the first two letters of the Classical Greek alphabet, “álpha” and “bêta”.

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 01/10/2026

Latin had a word “ū̆ncia” which meant ‘one part of something’. But because the Romans often counted things in 12s (like 12 inches in a foot), it came to mean ‘one-twelfth’, eventually yielding words like “inch” and “ounce” (which was originally ⅟₁₂ of a pound rather than ⅟₁₆).

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 30/09/2026

You can help raise awareness about Indian residential schools simply by wearing orange! You can also buy merchandise with special designs directly from the Orange Shirt Society: orangeshirtday.org

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 30/09/2026

Because of overcrowding and poor sanitary conditions, the death rate for children in Canadian boarding schools was also significantly higher than the rest of the school-age population in Canada.

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 30/09/2026

One of the major reasons why most Native American languages are endangered in the U.S. and Canada today is because of the Indian residential school system.

Pupils at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Pennsylvania, c. 1900

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 30/09/2026

Linguists are language scientists. Linguists study all the words—good, bad, and controversial. It is not the job of the linguist to pass judgment on the use of words, but to study how people *do* use language and the attitudes that other people have towards those uses.

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 29/09/2026

9 letters of the alphabet that we stopped using, from @robwords.bsky.social www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJxK...

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 29/09/2026

How the Chitimacha language was nearly lost—and is now undergoing a renaissance I talk about the history of the Chitimacha language, how new words are created for awakening languages, and the tribe’s remarkable story of linguistic revitalization on this episode of the Butter No Parsnips podcast:

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 28/09/2026

Sophia Smith Galer’s new book, "How to kill a language: Power, resistance, and the race to save our words" just came out in July. In it she explores why some languages cease to be spoken, and what we lose culturally when they disappear. @sophiasgaler.bsky.social

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 27/09/2026

English’s lost consonants Linguist @dannybate.bsky.social talks about the history of English sounds: dannylbate.substack.com/p/a-voice-fo...

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 27/09/2026

Incidentally, the word “prudence” is also distantly related to the word “wisdom”, through the Proto-Indo-European root *weid- ‘see’. #etymology #providence #linguistics #language

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 26/09/2026

The etymology of state names and capitol city names Read all the details here: word.tips/literal-tran...

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 25/09/2026

Why doesn’t English have a standard plural for “you”?

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 24/09/2026

Why do related languages independently develop parallel structures?

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 23/09/2026

The word “dude” has a pretty wild history! www.rd.com/article/wher...

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 22/09/2026

The etymologies of a few different endonyms and exonyms of different regions, from Starkey Comics starkeycomics.com/2025/10/31/e...

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 19/09/2026

Curious about linguistics but not sure where to start? Check out my Linguistics Starter Pack! It’s a curated list of some of the best general audience books to introduce you to linguistics. Amazon: www.amazon.com/shop/linguis... Bookshop: bookshop.org/lists/lingui...

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 18/09/2026

How does a word’s meaning change over time? All words have a history—but some have a more colorful past than others! blog.duolingo.com/words-change...

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 18/09/2026

Things I loved about “A deadly education” as a linguist: Spells in Old English and Proto-Indo-European! The more languages you know, the more spells you can learn! The author, Naomi Novik, clearly has some awareness of historical linguistics and language reconstruction, which is a lot of fun.

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 17/09/2026

A novel about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary may not seem like the most riveting reading material, but “The dictionary of lost words” became a New York Times bestseller when it was released in 2020 and has received wide acclaim and numerous awards.

Book cover for The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams. Dark navy background with gold vine patterns; the title appears on torn paper labels. At the bottom is an open reddish-brown suitcase filled with letters and papers, with a teacup and a red poppy on top. A circular “Reese’s Book Club” sticker is on the right.

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 16/09/2026

Did you know that the words “muscle” and “mussel” both come from a word meaning ‘small mouse’? @StarkeyComics.bsky.social has all the details in this post: www.facebook.com/starkeycomic...

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 15/09/2026

“In Embassytown, China Miéville describes the Arieki, a race of creatures that have bodies but whose edges are ill-defined and in flux. However, it is in their extreme language distance from the human visitors that the novel offers an insight for the xenolinguist.

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 14/09/2026

Did you know that the English word “black” is related to the word for white in other Indo-European languages? How’s that make sense? Check out all the details in this Facebook post from @StarkeyComics.bsky.social www.facebook.com/starkeycomic...

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 13/09/2026

The dystopian “Native Tongue” trilogy (1984), is about a group of linguists who “breed” women to be perfect interstellar translators. The women then create a new language, Láadan, as an act of resistance. “Native Tongue” is now a classic of feminist science fiction.

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 13/09/2026

Me casually posting anything about Indo-European languages: 👨🏼‍🏫 Albanians:

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 12/09/2026

How all the Indo-European words for ‘ten’ are related, from @starkeycomics.bsky.social Read all the details in this blog post: starkeycomics.com/2025/06/23/i...

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 11/09/2026

~ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Amazon: amzn.to/3JDyR5l Bookshop: bookshop.org/a/110785/978...

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 11/09/2026

A new study suggests that humanity reached peak linguistic diversity approximately 2,000 years ago, with an estimated 75,000 languages in use. Today there are only around 7,500.

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 10/09/2026

Did you know that “hemp”, “cannabis”, and “canvas” are all related? Here are all the details, from Starkey Comics. www.facebook.com/starkeycomic...

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 10/09/2026

I learned how to make maps this week! This is a map of Ancient Greek toponyms (place names) that are thought to be from a Pre-Greek, non–Indo-European language (i.e. the language spoken in the Aegean before the Greeks migrated into the area).

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 10/09/2026

Lyle Campbell is one of the world’s foremost experts on historical linguistics and language change. In this new book, he unravels the processes by which languages change in a way that’s accessible for a general reader.

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 08/09/2026

Around 1,000 Greek words can’t be traced to any Indo-European language. Where do they come from?

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 08/09/2026

Did you know that “merry”, “brief”, “embrace”, “brace”, “bra”, and “pretzel” are all related? For all the details, check out this blog post from @starkeycomics.bsky.social: starkeycomics.com/2024/12/31/u...

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 06/09/2026

The etymology of the primary colors in English, from Starkey Comics Read all the details in the blog post here: starkeycomics.com/2024/12/31/t...

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 05/09/2026

A garden path sentence is a grammatically correct sentence where the most likely interpretation of the first part of the sentence is actually the wrong one, and the reader has to switch interpretations.

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 04/09/2026

Did you know that Wiktionary has transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet, often for multiple dialects and even with audio recordings, for most of its words? Such an incredibly useful resource. www.wiktionary.org

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 03/09/2026

The Association for Linguistic Typology maintains Grammar Watch, a database of reference grammars of the world’s languages: linguistic-typology.org/grammarwatch/

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 02/09/2026

Here’s a useful graphic I came across this week showing where each of the consonant phonemes of English is formed in the mouth

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 01/09/2026

PHOIBLE is a database of the sounds in 2,168 of the world’s languages. You can explore which languages have which sounds and lots more. This is a map of all the languages in the database which have the /tʃʼ/ sound (a palato-alveolar ejective affricate).

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 31/08/2026

If you haven’t encountered Pink Trombone before, you won’t be disappointed. It’s a saggital section (vertical cross-section) of the vocal tract that you can manipulate to create different sounds! dood.al/pinktrombone/

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 30/08/2026

Kanzi is a bonobo who learned to communicate using symbols! In this video, Ryan Rhodes @langofmind.bsky.social breaks down exactly what Kanzi’s linguistic abilities were, and what this tells us about the human language faculty: www.youtube.com/watch?v=blzq...

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Linguistic Discovery @linguisticdiscovery.com · 29/08/2026

Many of the most common words in the English language are really quite weird when you start digging into their origins.

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