Articles
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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. |
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Poetry of Arabic greetings The polite phrases we use everyday often have a profound meaning we forget by repeating them over and over. Yet it is still there, hidden in plain sight, as it is the case in the Arabic language. |
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Japanese is such a fun language to learn In this article, I am going to share with you a few fun facts about Japanese language from a language geek’s perspective, and explain why, from my point of view, Japanese is such a fun language to learn. |
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EU State of the Union address reading ease The European Union State of the Union address is a speech addressed by the President of the European Commission to the European Parliament plenary session in September each year. This political discourse reading ease, which evolves with the style of each president, can be compared from one year to the other, the most recent one being Jean-Claude Juncker’s in September 2016. |
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International Auxiliary Languages and Wikipedia International Auxiliary Languages have found on Wikipedia a new space to expand their reach. If Esperanto and Volapük are the most used IAL, Ido, Interlingua, Interlingue, and Novial are also present in the picture. Let’s see their publication rate over the years to get a better feeling of their progression. |