Questions tagged [language]
The specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication.
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Do negative interactions with AI make us worse at interacting with people?
There have been a number of articles from credible sources suggesting that negative interactions with AI change the way that we interact with others. In each of the quotes below, I have added my own ...
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Did the Japanese military use the Kagoshima dialect to protect their communications during WW2?
During WW2, the US military made good use of many code talkers who spoke in languages the enemy was highly unlikely to understand, most famously Navajo.
Discussions about this often mention that the ...
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Is it true that "One-Eyed Willy" means "penis"?
I’d like to verify a claim found on several platforms, with regards to sexual innuendo in the movie "The Goonies".
The website states the following:
The boys are looking for the treasure of ...
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Is Stanford's "Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative" real?
The Wall Street Journal claims that this document is a legitimate initiative of Stanford University.
It recommends, for example, that the term "blind study", widely used in experimental ...
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Did Kyiv National Linguistic University publish a map showing that only a few Ukrainians (in the West of the country) speak Ukrainian at home?
Various Russian & other sources give this map (also on P.SE, but probably the most notable of these might be https://www.opendemocracy.net/ru/kto-boretsya-s-kem-v-ukraine-i-pochemu/)
Was that ...
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In American Sign Language, does 2022 loosely translate to "bird go peace-peace"?
This Tweet is doing the rounds:
Hearing people are like joke-panicking about the fact that 2022 is pronounced “2020, too”. But like in ASL, 2022 loosely translates to “BIRD go PEACE-PEACE” and that’s ...
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Is "Mu" a more common last name than "Xi" in China?
Is "Mu", which has a coronavirus variant named after it by the World Health Organization, a more common last name than "Xi", which the WHO has avoided naming a variant after?
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Was "their" a singular pronoun in English before the 16th century?
I saw this meme on facebook:
So, was "their" truly a genderless 3rd person singular pronoun prior to some change in the 16th/17th century?
This Wikipedia article indicates that the ...
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Are the ingredients listed in "Macbeth" common plants?
It is easy to find dozens of sites claiming, generally without attribution, that the ingredients in the famously gruesome witches' brew from Shakespeare's play Macbeth are herbalist jargon for common ...
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Did Parker Pens release an advertisement in Spanish that accidentally implied their pens would prevent pregnancy?
I've heard some variation of this story a handful of times: an advertisement for a pen was meant to claim that it wouldn't leak in your pocket and embarass you, but in Spanish, they used the word ...
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Is Japanese language "cleaner" than English in terms of spreading coronavirus?
I was watching a video from Abroad In Japan channel where Chris Broad, the creator of that channel talks about a TV show in which "experts" discussed about the reasons why number of cases of ...
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In Sumerian and Akkadian, is the same word used for both ‘priest’ and ‘accountant’?
Johan Norberg in Open: The Story of Human Progress (2020) claims:
In Sumerian and Akkadian the same word is used both for ‘priest’ and ‘accountant’.
Is this true?
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Did Burmese typewriters contain an upside-down character, which subsequently became proper typewriter style?
I was reading about the Internet Archive's work to archive the materials of a famous New York City typewriter family:
http://blog.archive.org/2020/08/26/an-archive-of-a-different-type/
I was ...
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Does learning a language improve memory and concentration skills?
When using the language learning app Duo Lingo messages often popup when the lessons are loading. One of those messages that pop up is the claim
Learning a language improves memory and ...
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Are North American children adopting British accents because of Peppa Pig?
Several news items have surfaced today which report that North American children are adopting British accents at a very young age due to watching Peppa Pig episodes. The only source quoted is Romper ...
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