Semantics

The Treaty That Had Two Meanings

New Zealand's founding document, the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, exists in two languages—but it tells two different stories. A crucial…

5 days ago

The Hidden ‘Event’ in Every Verb

Have you ever wondered how a simple action can be described with endless detail? The secret lies in a hidden…

5 days ago

Lexical Gaps Across Languages

Ever wonder why German has a word for taking pleasure in someone else's misfortune (*Schadenfreude*), but English doesn't? This post…

5 days ago

Autohyponymy: The Word Inside

Can a word be a specific type of itself? This article introduces autohyponymy, a fascinating linguistic quirk where words like…

5 days ago

The Mass-Count Distinction

Why can you count 'chairs' but not 'furniture'? This linguistic puzzle is explained by the mass-count distinction, a fundamental rule…

5 days ago

The ‘Gavagai’ Problem: How We Map Words to Reality

Imagine a speaker in a new language points to a rabbit and says "gavagai." How do you know if it…

1 month ago

The Grammar of a Menu: How Wording Whets the Appetite

Ever wonder why "Grandma's slow-cooked apple pie" sounds more appealing than just "apple pie"? The secret lies in menu engineering,…

1 month ago

Logograms vs. Ideograms: There’s a Difference

Is Chinese a language of "idea-pictures"? Not quite. This common misconception confuses ideograms, which are language-independent symbols for concepts, with…

1 month ago

How Algorithms Read Your Resume

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) don't "read" your resume; they parse it using strict linguistic rules. To get past this digital…

1 month ago

Your Brain’s Internal Fact-Checker

When you hear a false statement like "The sky is green", your brain reacts in milliseconds, long before you consciously…

1 month ago

This website uses cookies.