A Meaning of the Circumflex — In French orthography, there are diacritics, such as the acute accent, the grave accent, and the circumflex. A function of the circumflex in French is to denote letters, usually the letter s, that used to be in the spelling of words but no longer. Let us see what happens when…

How linguistics can better inform our designs — Interesting findings on the perception of time are discussed by Professor Lera Boroditsky in chapter 20 of the book Space, Time, and Number in the Brain: Searching for the Directions of Mathematical Thought (Attention and Performance), edited by Stanislas Dehaene and Elizabeth Brannon. One of the findings is that the…

In modern Japanese, while the use of kanji facilitates reading due to compression of meaning within a writing space, it also obfuscates etymology in the language, as compared to languages with a written alphabet. For example, take the Japanese word for eyeglasses, which is 眼鏡, read as めがね (megane). The…

Makings of a more regular language — In The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages, the the author, Frederick Bodmer, argues that the third-person present indicative conjugation (of regular verbs) in English serves no purpose and that it should be eliminated for the hypothetical aim of making English into a more logical…

Oxford spelling uses the spelling that is closest to a word’s etymological origin. For example, we spell the word ‘organization’ with a z because the Medieval Latin word from which it derived had a z. We spell the verb ‘to analyse’ with an s because the Greek root had an…

Writing better microcopy for a museum’s ticketing page — The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is a modern and contemporary art museum in New York City. The museum became a part of the UNESCO World Heritage List in July 2019. Domestic and international visitors go to see the museum every year. …

Once you’ve learned the general rules for French spelling and pronunciation, like not pronouncing the final letter of words, you may find that it’s generally consistent except for certain cases like the following. Example 1 French femme IPA /fam/ English translation: woman; wife N.B. Anglophone learners of the French language…