Articles
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How big is one billion? Big numbers make our head spin. The more zeros we add, the less understandable they are. Ten thousand, a hundred thousand, these are numbers we can understand. Beyond that, it gets more difficult. So, in the end, how much is one billion? |
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Last train for Bansko In the southwest of Bulgaria, in the city of Bansko, lies an abandoned train. Like an invite to urban exploration, it shows signs with cryptic messages in Bulgarian and Czech I will try to decipher. |
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Vingt or vingts: the plural mark on French numbers Should we write vingt or vingts? Here is a question that comes up regularly, and not only among French dictation fanatics. Let’s review the grammatical rules of the plural mark for vingt, but also for quatre-vingts, for cent and for some other French numbers. |
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Malagasy language: a first approach Verb-Object-Subject word order, adjectives reduplication, inclusive and exclusive us, a place deixis with seven degrees, circumstancial voice… Discover the Malagasy language and its particularities. |
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Alison Long biography Alison Long, who holds a PhD in Russian language change, have many research interests, including language change, endangered languages and language policy, and language construction. In that field, she’s created the Illitan language for the BBC’s adaptation of China Miéville’s The City and The City. |
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Quite singular plurals In most languages, the singular is the unmarked form of a word, and the plural is obtained by inflecting the singular. For instance, to the singular form cat of the English language matches the plural form cats. English counts two grammatical numbers: singular and plural. Other languages have different forms of grammatical numbers depending on the number of items, which can pose some troubles when localizing. |
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The ether units of Ethereum If both euro and dollar have their cents and the British pound its pence, the ether, the cryptographic currency of Ethereum, has many subdivisions, from the milliether or finney to the wei, 18 decimals after the decimal point. What are they? Where do their name come from? |
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From Toyota to Kanban, the Japanese roots of agile frameworks The Toyota Production System is a work organization developed by the Japanese engineer Taiichi Ōno in 1962. Also called lean manufactoring, it brings together several concepts later transposed into agile methodologies (RUP, XP, Kanban, Scrum…). Here is a lexicon of these concepts with their Japanese name. |
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Monero, learn Esperanto with a cryptocurrency One world, one language, one currency (Unu mondo, unu lingvo, unu mono). This slogan of universality expresses the unity sought by Esperantists in the promotion of their language. The creation of a cryptographic currency with an evocative name, monero, shows how easy it is to create words in Esperanto thanks to its system of affixes. |
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Jessica Coon biography After her linguistics studies concluded by a PhD from the MIT in 2010, Jessica Coon joined the Montreal McGill Department of Linguistics as Associate Professor. She is known from the general public thanks to her consultancy for Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival movie. |