Village I’m currently working with needs a writing system, they want to use “h” for a weak schwa-like vowel, giving e.g. “athk” as disyllabic word. Seems like an unusual choice, but I guess ok?
Berik (Tor Family, western Papua) has incredibly cool time and space inflection. gives us words like: tiel - “I came from the west ( a long time ago)” Pictured: Berik man, Hanok Borom
video call with a Papuan friend: “Good morning brother, you look very beautiful.” YES this is how we should do conversation.
First up, REASONING WITH CONCEPTS: Conceptual Spaces as a Framework by Peter Gärdenfors and Matías Osta-Vélez, just published this spring. mitpress.mit.edu/978026205340...
Reasoning with Concepts
Psychologists and philosophers have worked on topics such as category-based induction, nonmonotonic reasoning, analogies, and generics, but these problems ha...
mitpress.mit.edu
Philip Laughlin@philiplaughlin.bsky.social · 3w agoWith #CogSci2026 right around the corner, now is a good time to highlight some of the #OACogSci publishing that's been happening @mitpress.bsky.social over the past few years. I'll be posting regularly about this before, during, and (slightly) after the conference in Rio. Watch this space!
Working with native Abkhaz speakers has so long been a dream of mine and I get to do this now. :) The most based interaction: Abkhaz granny: Are there Abkhaz speakers in India? Me: No. Abkhaz granny: Now there will be.
I'm really happy to see the Top End Language Statement is now released. Starting in 2022, people from 10+ different communities across the Top End, speaking a wide range of different languages, worked together to develop this statement. It's an impressive piece of coordinated language activism.
Dozens of Aboriginal language custodians call for further revival efforts
Aboriginal language custodians release a road map for the survival and revival of Northern Territory Indigenous languages.
abc.net.au
A Very Cool Thing: Astrolabe from Seville, 1224 AD (Oxford HSM inv.50934). On the throne, at the top of the instrument, note the #geometry diagram: it shows the method for bisecting a segment, used here to draw the meridian line. The maker engraved it fully, offering us a glimpse into their process…
Learning about Italian culture, aka how to use “cazzo” in a sentence.
Imagine being a hagfish. It’s actually quite offensive
I would have thought letting your dog lead the lab might fail the students in some ways, but maybe I’m old fashioned
Science Magazine@science.org · last mo."As I sat at my desk wrestling with the grant proposal I was coordinating, I could feel my eyes glaze over. … But just then an unlikely lab member offered a reprieve: my dog, Zazil." #ScienceWorkingLife https://scim.ag/4evO2cN
“well it depends what the question is” Most evergreen academic reply I swear it works for everything
I would like to ask descriptive linguists not to use "marked" in a vague way. My supervisor Jane Simpson always got the red pen out for that, and I am now following in her footsteps.
Coverage in the Guardian of our latest publication in Royal Society Open Science, with fantastic collaborators Alan McElligott (@amcell.bsky.social), Christian Nawroth (@goatswhostare.bsky.social), Federico Rossano and Simon Townsend. Paper threaded below! www.theguardian.com/science/2026...
Goats can find food by following a human voice, study finds
Experiments show 29 animals moved towards a treat-filled bucket 60% of the time when guided by a researcher
theguardian.com
Shameful that so many universities continue to normalise relations with the Israeli regime www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...
Video shows family’s car slowing before Israeli troops shot dead Palestinian baby
Footage appears to contradict Israeli military’s account of killing of seven-month-old Sam Abu Haikal in West Bank
theguardian.com
🚨 New Publication Alert!🚨 Polysemy and metaphorical extension in an artificial language learning experiment (w/ @elizabethqingzhang.bsky.social & Marek Placiński). Out now in #OpenAcess in Language and Cognition. 🧵1/ #language #linguistics doi.org/10.1017/lang...
analysis of declining linguistics jobs in USA 😬
AR Deal@ardeal.bsky.social · 2mo agowe ran the numbers-- they are bad
_Uniform Information Density_ _Working Memory chunking_ ... these seem related, both to do with unit size constraints Any work on this?
One of the main things keeping me going in life is that I really like breakfast.
Don't miss the latest episode of @smwilson.bsky.social's Language Neuroscience Podcast with @rmc-law.bsky.social and @vborghesani.bsky.social teasing the program of #SNL2026! 🍏 open.spotify.com/episode/0zAE... 🍎 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/s...
SNL 2026 teaser with Valentina Borghesani and Ryan Law
open.spotify.com
TWO great jobs in History and Philosophy of Science at Sydney! Rank from Lecturer (Assistant Prof) to Assoc Prof. Particularly interested in candidates working in the areas of early modern science, or science or medicine in Asia, or Indigenous knowledge systems... #HPS #STS #histstm #histsci
Lecturer/Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor to the School of History and Philosophy of Science - Camperdown, Australia job with UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY | 410910
Build your research and apply your expertise by contributing as a Lecturer/Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor to the School of History and Philos...
timeshighereducation.com
New preprint by Charles Kemp and myself, comparing quantitative frameworks that seek to measure the functional optimality of languages. osf.io/preprints/ps...
OSF
osf.io
A new version (2.0) of Frank Seifart's Affix Borrowing database, now co-authored with Francesco Gardani: afbo.info
Version 1.0 of the Grammaticon is now online! This has been in the making for over eight years. Quite a few of the entries are still preliminary, but I hope to expand and improve it over the coming months and years. Comments are welcome! An intro text is here: dlc.hypotheses.org/4316
"The origins and evolution of writing: A very brief synthesis" at Cambridge 16:30, 20th May. Zoom in, if you're in a compatible time zone!
