Reading Time: 6 minutesThere’s a newish CSS feature called hyphens that specifies how you want words to be hyphenated when the text wraps.

But if you use it, you’re going to need to make sure you’re also correctly identifying the language. And to understand why that matters, we need to talk about words and syllables.

Reading Time: 16 minutesEveryone speaks at least one language. It’s fascinating how we learned that first language, too. Without any formal instruction, we heard it, repeated it, and found ourselves effective communicators within about seven years. And in that time, we learned what our language sounded like, too. 

Reading Time: 16 minutesPronoun is a spicy word these days and let me tell ya: I love spicy food. I figuratively and literally enjoy a delightful sting when I’m partaking in some sort of nourishment. There’s a lot of talk about pronouns but I want to talk through them: What they are, their linguistic function, and how they

Reading Time: 12 minutesThis here is a friendly introduction to linguistics for programmers. There are many ways to improve our programming skills: watching videos, reading articles, hackathons, and doing code competitions. But there’s another way that gives us less time in front of an IDE: Learning to think about how programming works. We’re not talking about how compilers

Reading Time: 4 minutesPeople are sometimes unprepared to learn that I have a deep (read: unhealthy) interest in languages. Up to and including, “how do you even figure out what makes a language so languagey?” (sidenote: apologies to the mother of the 8 year old a few days ago who wanted to know why bears are called bears)

Reading Time: 4 minutesFolks who get to know me usually (and regrettably) discover that I am a language nerd. I like learning languages and I like learning about languages. There’s all sorts of things that are fascinating about languages: where they come from, why they sound a certain way, why grammar is what it is. But lately, I’ve

Reading Time: 5 minutesThanks to a solid 55 years or so of film and TV telling us that the AIs we create will try to kill us, and then watching ChatGPT and operator-attacking-murder-AIs emerge in roughly the same 6 month time frame , I feel absolutely confident in saying that humans are terrible listeners. But I think, also,

Reading Time: 3 minutesAbout every month I find myself looking at some US Dialect Map trying to figure out where some person I’ve met fits in. And inevitably it takes me back to pondering the fact that in my own family we speak at least two, maybe three separate dialects of American English. In fact I have a

Reading Time: 2 minutesFor the last two years my wife and I have been privately taking ASL (American Sign Language) lessons. We are far from fluent but we’re also well beyond introductions and names. And something that you might wonder is, “are there accents and dialects in signed languages?”.

Reading Time: 4 minutesEver heard that Arabic has 10 million words? That English has a million? French has 80,000, or that the Alaskan Inuits have no word for love but 16 for snow? Why is that?