Subject
8 entries
Linguistics
Bookmarks
Words We Don't Have
A site exploring words from other languages that don't have English equivalents — concepts like saudade, schadenfreude, or hygge that reveal how different cultures carve up emotional and social experience. Language as a lens into cultural cognition.
Speech and Language Processing (Jurafsky & Martin)
The free online draft of Jurafsky and Martin's 'Speech and Language Processing' — the canonical NLP textbook, covering everything from regex to transformers, now in its 3rd edition. Freely available online in draft form and unusually well-written for a technical textbook.
Zipf's Law Arises Naturally When There Are Underlying, Unobserved Variables
A PLOS Computational Biology paper arguing that Zipf's Law — the power law governing word frequency, city size, income distribution, and countless other phenomena — arises naturally whenever observed variables are log-linear functions of hidden unobserved variables. Explains the law's ubiquity without requiring any special generative mechanism.
The Zipf Mystery
A video exploring the mystery of Zipf's Law — why word frequencies, city populations, income distributions, and dozens of other natural and social phenomena follow the same power-law distribution. Directly relevant to the naming of Zipfian Academy.
A Tour of the British Isles in Accents
YouTube video touring the diversity of British accents — a linguistic curiosity saved after being shared by a friend. The accent differences across the British Isles are remarkably dense geographically.
Burgled vs. Burglarized: Which Is More Correct?
English Stack Exchange answer on 'burgled' vs 'burglarized' — mapping the geographic distribution and tracking when the American form diverged from the British. Saved from a tweet noting something changed in usage in the 1960s.
The Crayola-fication of the World: How We Gave Colors Names (Part II)
Part II of an Empirical Zeal series on how naming colors changes how we perceive them — connecting Sapir-Whorf linguistic relativity to neuroimaging studies showing that named colors are processed differently across brain hemispheres. One of the best accessible treatments of how language shapes perceptual categories.
Why Is 'x' the Unknown?
A TED talk by Terry Moore tracing why 'x' became the symbol for an unknown quantity — it comes from the Arabic 'xei' (thing/something), transliterated into Spanish via a sound that doesn't exist in Spanish phonology. A reminder that mathematical notation has contingent historical origins.