Linguistics
BigCat's Linguistics
The machinery of language · Brain and acquisition · Change and diversity · Humans versus machines
Day 1
Language Is Not a Dictionary
Duality of patterning · Arbitrariness and the onomatopoeia exception · Why recursion makes sentences endless
Day 2
The Invisible Choreography in Your Mouth
How airflow gets blocked · b and p differ by milliseconds · Why adult accents almost never change
Day 3
The Grid Your Brain Draws Over Sound
Phonemes and categorical perception · Why some ears can't split L from R · The ability babies throw away before age one
Day 4
Words Are Assembled
Roots and affixes · Inflection versus derivation · What it means to say Chinese 'has no morphology'
Day 5
Sentences Have Skeletons
Constituents and hierarchy · Why one sentence can mean two things · How far a question word can travel
Day 6
Can Meaning Be Computed
Compositionality · Reference and truth · How tall is 'tall': the edges of vague words
Day 7
You Say Less Than You Mean
Cooperative principle and implicature · Why 'can you pass the salt' isn't a question · How irony gets understood
Day 8
Starting With Patients Who Couldn't Speak
Broca and Wernicke · What lesions taught us · Why the classic two-area model collapsed
Day 9
Is There an Organ for Language
The modularity debate · The FOXP2 story and the overblown 'language gene'
Day 10
Two Languages in One Head
The cost and the payoff of switching · Code-switching follows rules · Where the bilingual-advantage debate stands
Day 11
Sign Language Is a Full Language
Grammar in space · Signers get aphasia too · Which default assumption it overturned
Day 12
Reading Is a Skill the Brain Never Prepared For
Neuronal recycling · Dyslexia · Different writing systems train different circuits
Day 13
Babies Are Statisticians
Cutting words out of a continuous stream · The eight-month-old experiment · Prosody as signposting
Day 14
Poverty of the Stimulus, or Usage-Based
Chomsky versus Tomasello · Where the argument stands today
Day 15
Children's Mistakes Carry the Most Information
Overregularization · Errors are the proof a rule was learned
Day 16
Children Can Invent Grammar From Nothing
Creoles · Nicaraguan Sign Language · One generation is enough
Day 17
Is the Critical Period Real
The age curve in second-language learning · Isolated-child cases and their ethical shadow
Day 18
The Rise and Fall of the Whorf Hypothesis
How the strong version died · Which piece of the weak version survived
Day 19
Can Language Change What You See
The color-word experiments · People who speak in compass directions · Which way time flows
Day 20
Thinking in a Foreign Language Makes You Colder
The foreign-language effect · Shifts in moral judgment and risk appetite · What it means for multilingual work
Day 21
That Voice in Your Head
Inner speech · Some people have no inner monologue · Does thought require language
Day 22
Language Changes Like a River
Why sound change is so regular · Grammaticalization: how content words wear down into grammar
Day 23
Finding a Language's Relatives
How the comparative method works · Reconstructing Indo-European · How far back it stops working
Day 24
When Languages Meet
Layers of borrowing · Pidgins and creoles · Linguistic areas
Day 25
Whose Speech Counts as 'Standard'
Dialect and standard · Language attitudes · Who decided what's grammatical
Day 26
Languages Are Disappearing
How fast, and what exactly is lost · Has revival ever worked
Day 27
What Makes Chinese Unusual
Tone · Classifiers · Topic prominence · The costs and payoffs of the character system
Day 28
From Rules to Statistics
Sixty years of machine translation · Why hand-written grammars lost
Day 29
A Word Is Known by the Company It Keeps
The distributional hypothesis · From co-occurrence counts to word vectors · An idea far older than deep learning
Day 30
Where Does a Word End
Why Chinese word segmentation is hard · BPE and tokens · How the cut shapes what a model can do
Day 31
Did Large Models Learn Grammar
Probing experiments · Subject-verb agreement tests · Structure or correlation
Day 32
Which Machines Can Handle Which Languages
The Chomsky hierarchy · Where natural language actually sits
Day 33
A Model's Surprise Predicts Your Eye Movements
Surprisal and reading time · What the correlation does and doesn't show
Day 34
Does the Machine Hear What You Mean
Testing pragmatic competence · Indirect requests · The theory-of-mind controversy
Day 35
Did Large Models Make Linguistics Obsolete
What theoretical linguistics still does that nothing else does
Day 36
Do Animals Have Language
The bee dance · The ape sign-language controversy · Where the criterion should sit
Day 37
Writing Was Invented
Independent origins happened only a few times · Alphabet, syllabary, logography
Day 38
Identity Inside an Accent
Code-switching · Linguistic discrimination · How the way you talk becomes evidence
Day 39
Are There Real Language Universals
Testing universal grammar · The Pirahã controversy · Is recursion actually required
Day 40
Mistakes Linguistics Has Made
Samples piled onto a handful of languages · How 'Eskimos have a hundred words for snow' spread