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