Can AI Bring Extinct Languages Back To Life?
A project out of MIT is using artificial intelligence to scan lost languages and find rules and conventions that may help us figure out what all those words from years ago might mean.
A City In New Zealand Has Its Own Wizard
There is at least one person in the world who's paid to be a wizard, and he's under contract with the city of Christchurch, New Zealand.
Kids In Nicaragua Created Their Own Sign Language
In the 1980s Deaf children in Nicaragua were sent to a new school that was supposed to help them learn finger spelling. Instead, they built up their own language.
What Do You Call People In Each State?
Vivid Maps released a map of the U.S. by demonym, which is the term for a word that describes people from a certain place. Some are straightforward, but there are also plenty of surprises.
The Smart Glove That Can Translate Sign Language Into Speech
A team at UCLA has built technology into a glove that can recognize the hand movements from American Sign Language and translate those movements into spoken English in real time through a smartphone app.
The Letters of the English Alphabet Weren’t Added in Alphabetical Order
Amazingly, the English alphabet added its last letter in 1524, and no, that letter wasn't Z. We'll explain how an Italian grammarian convinced the world to add one more letter to the list.
How French Soup-Makers Helped Give Us Restaurants
It's National Waitstaff Day, and whether or not you're back to dining out, it's a good time to figure out a little of where restaurants come from. (It's complicated.)
Predictive Text Is Changing, Not Just Predicting, What We Write
A new Harvard study finds those systems that suggest words to us when we type on our smartphones are actually shaping the way we write sentences and messages.
Stella The Dog Uses A Soundboard
Stella the dog lives with a speech-language pathologist and has been using a soundboard to "say" several dozen words, raising hopes that someday the show "Dog With A Blog" may come to life.
What Is The Euphemism For “I Dropped A Frog”?
Scientific papers can be wild. When they refer to “unplanned rapid disassembly," that’s an academic way of saying “accidentally exploded.”