Language & Words

Phonetics & the IPA: The Alphabet That Spells Sounds, Not Letters

Though, through, cough, rough, plough, thought — six words, six wildly different pronunciations of the same four letters, "ough." English spelling is not a reliable guide to English sound, and it never really was. There's a whole alphabet built to fix exactly this problem, and once you can read it, you stop guessing how a word is said and start knowing.

How to Read a Dictionary's Pronunciation Guide

Look up "photography" in two different dictionaries and you might see two transcriptions that barely resemble each other: /fəˈtɒɡrəfi/ in one, \fə-ˈtä-grə-fē\ in another. Same word, same sounds, same language — but two completely different notation systems, and if you don't know that going in, the second one can look like a typo of the first rather than what it actually is: a whole separate, internally consistent way of writing pronunciation down.

Where English Words Come From: A Language Built in Layers

You can ask a question, question a suspect, or interrogate a prisoner. All three mean roughly the same thing, and each one arrived in English from a different place at a different time. Ask is Old English. Question came with the French. Interrogate was lifted straight out of Latin. Hidden inside that one small set is most of the history of the English language.

The Family Tree of Languages

English mother

How Language Changes, and Why It Isn't Decay

Somewhere around the 300s AD, a Roman teacher wrote out a list of 227 mistakes his students kept making. Write oculus, not oclus. Write calida, not calda. Write vetulus, not veclus. The list, now called the Appendix Probi, was meant to stop Latin from falling apart.

How Children Learn Language: The Greatest Learning Feat Nobody Teaches

Nobody gives a toddler grammar lessons. Nobody explains that English adds -s for plurals or -ed for the past. And yet by about age four, most children speak in full, complicated sentences. One day you hear the proof, because the child says "I goed to the park" or "look at the mouses."

Learning a Language as an Adult: What the Research Actually Says

"It's too late, I should have started as a kid." This is the most common reason adults give for never learning a second language, and it is about half true. The half that's false is the half that matters.

Grammar Without Tears: The 10 Rules That Actually Matter

Most people were taught grammar as a list of crimes. Never split an infinitive. Never end a sentence with a preposition. Never start a sentence with "And." The trouble is that several of those "rules" are not real, and the ones that are real were rarely explained.

Punctuation That Changes Meaning

In 2017, a federal appeals court in the United States ruled in a case about overtime pay for dairy delivery drivers in Maine. The whole case came down to one missing comma. Judge David Barron wrote: "For want of a comma, we have this case." The dairy later settled with its drivers for $5 million.

Plain Writing: How to Be Understood on the First Read