AI researchers are using techniques inspired by neuroscience to study how language models work — and to reveal how perplexing they can be.

We insist that large language models repeatedly translate their mathematical processes into words. There may be a better way.

  A Distinguished Crankologist

One of the first executive orders that President Trump signed after his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025, was titled Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship. The order accused the previous administration of having "trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans' speech on online platforms."

About the free online Dictionary of Affixes.

Amost 3000 pages on the origins, history, evolution and idiosyncrasies of the English language worldwide.

Humans are known to make mental associations between various real-world stimuli and concepts, including colors. For example, red and orange are typically associated with words such as "hot" or "warm," blue with "cool" or "cold," and white with "clean."

The following is a guest post by Edgar Allen Poe. Poe completed many works of both fiction and nonfiction in his life, including ‘The Raven’, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, ‘Eureka’, and most famously, the ‘Tell-Tale Heart’. Many are unaware that one of Poe’s first jobs was as a technical writer. In this post, he explains some deep conflicts and challenges he had on one project, and how he overcame the challenges.

The AI revolution, which has begun to transform our lives over the past three years, is built on a fundamental linguistic principle that lies at the base of large language models such as ChatGPT. Words in a natural language are not strung together in random patterns; rather, there is a statistical structure that allows the model to guess the next word based on what came before. Yet these models overlook a crucial dimension of human communication: content that is not conveyed by words.

103: A hand-y guide to gesture Gestures: every known language has them, and there’s a growing body of research on how they fit into communication. But academic literature can be hard to dig into on your own. So Lauren has spent the past 5 years diving into the gesture literature and boiling it down into a tight 147 page book. In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about Lauren’s new book, Gesture: A Slim Guide from Oxford University Press. Is it a general audience book? An academic book? A bit of both. (Please enjoy our highlights version in this episode, a slim guide to the Slim Guide, if you will.) We talk about the wacky hijinks gesture researchers have gotten up to with the aim of preventing people from gesturing without tipping them off that the study is about gesture, including a tricked-out “coloured garden relax chair” that makes people “um” more, as well as crosslinguistic gestural connections between signed and spoken languages, and how Gretchen’s gestures in English have been changing after a year of ASL classes. Plus, a few behind-the-scenes moments: Lauren putting a line drawing of her very first gesture study on the cover, and how the emoji connection from Because Internet made its way into Gesture (and also into the emoji on your phone right now). There were also many other gesture stories that we couldn’t fit in this episode, so keep an eye out for Lauren doing guest interviews on other podcasts! We’ll add them to the crossovers page and the Lingthusiasm hosts elsewhere playlist as they come up. And if there are any other shows you’d like to hear a gesture episode on, feel free to tell them to chat to Lauren! Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here. Announcements: We’ve made a special jazzed-up version of the Lingthusiasm logo to put on stickers, featuring fun little drawings from the past 8.5 years of enthusiasm about linguistics by our artist Lucy Maddox. There’s a leaping Gavagai rabbit, bouba and kiki shapes, and more…see how many items you can recognize! This sticker (or possibly a subtle variation…stay tuned for an all-patron vote!) will go out to everyone who’s a patron at the Lingthusiast level or higher as of July 1st, 2025. We’re also hoping that this sticker special offer encourages people to join and stick around as we need to do an inflation-related price increase at the Lingthusiast level. As we mentioned on the last bonus episode, our coffee hasn’t cost us five bucks in a while now, and we need to keep paying the team who enables us to keep making the show amid our other linguistics prof-ing and writing jobs. In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about linguist celebrities! We talk about start with the historically famous Brothers Grimm and quickly move onto modern people of varying levels of fame, including a curiously large number of linguistics figure skaters. We also talk about a few people who are famous within linguistics, including a recent memoir by Noam Chomsky’s assistant Bev Stohl about what it was like keeping him fueled with coffee. And finally, we reflect on running into authors of papers we’ve read at conferences, when people started recognizing us sometimes, and our tips and scripts for navigating celebrity encounters from both sides. Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 90+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds. Here are the links mentioned in the episode: ‘Gesture: A Slim Guide’ by Lauren Gawne Lingthusiasm episode ’Emoji are Gesture Because Internet’ Lingthusiasm episode ’Villages, gifs, and children: Researching signed languages in real-world contexts with Lynn Hou’ Lingthusiasm episode ’Bringing stories to life in Auslan - Interview with Gabrielle Hodge’ 'Gesture, Speech, and Lexical Access: The Role of Lexical Movements in Speech Production’ by Rauscher et al. 'Effects of Visual Accessibility and Hand Restraint on Fluency of Gesticulator and Effectiveness of Message’ by Karen P. Lickiss and A. Rodney Wellens 'Effects of relative immobilization on the speaker’s nonverbal behavior and on the dialogue imagery level’ by Rimé et al. 'The effects of elimination of hand gestures and of verbal codability on speech performance’ by J. A. Graham and S. Heywood You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening. To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list. You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon. Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic. Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo. Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles. This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

A blog about literature not yet available in English

A blog about all things linguistic by Gretchen McCulloch. I cohost Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm the author of Because Internet, a book about internet language!

The Flaxen Wave: On Poetry, Translation, and Russian Culture (Льнянокудрая волна), by Jamie Olson

"Exclusive Delirium"------"I am a mystic at heart and I believe in nothing." Baudelaire

A blog mostly about Russian literature and translation issues, as retailed by a small stuffed dinosaur.

Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (especially statistics)

Reading ideas from Russian classic and contemporary fiction

An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regatur.

Essays, Translations, and Other Writings

Notes on Book Collecting, Bibliomania, and Libricide

People from Glasgow, Belfast, Dublin and the north-east of England are better at detecting someone imitating their accent than people from London and Essex, new research from the University of Cambridge has found. People from Belfast proved most able to detect someone faking their accent, while people from London, Essex and Bristol were least accurate.

In the early 19th Century a small group of Liberians invented a way to write the Vai language down. Instead of copying Roman or Arabic letters, as occurred