Linguistic Discovery

Hi! 👋 Linguistic Discovery teaches you all about the science and diversity of language—a field known as linguistics.

I (Danny Hieber, Ph.D.) post daily about how language works and the incredible diversity of the world’s languages.

Did you know there are dictionaries that are organized by how frequently each word is used?

SUPER useful if you're learning the language.

Routledge has a whole collection of them for various languages:

link.amazon/B08mIOpRf

English “pencil” comes from:

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Old French “pincel” ‘artist’s paintbrush’, which comes from:

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Latin “penicillus” ‘painter’s brush’, literally ‘little hair’ because the brush was made of hair. This is a diminutive form of:

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Latin “peniculus” ‘brush’, which is itself a diminutive form of:

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Latin “penis” ‘tail’, which of course also gave us:

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English “penis”

📜 AI is helping scholars understand ancient tablets, documents, and inscriptions

🔠 Definition of dyslexia updated for the first time in 20 years

🐕 Dogs listen for consonants in speech, just like human infants

👀 Bionic (bolded) reading doesn’t speed up skilled readers

🗞️ Here’s what happened this week in language and linguistics!

linguisticdiscovery.com/posts/2026-44/

All words have multiple pronunciations.

Pronunciations vary by dialect and even individual speaker. So *every* will always have multiple pronunciations.

Are some ways of pronouncing words more common? Sure. More prestigious? Definitely. Unconventional? You bet. But *other pronunciations aren’t legitimate just because you don’t like them*.

People’s judgements about pronunciation are arbitrary. People think that whatever dialect they grew up speaking is “correct”, or that the only correct way to speak is how socially prestigious people speak.

“the” pronunciation of a word doesn’t exist. The “correct” pronunciation of a word is a myth.

So when you’re thinking about pronunciation, always think in the plural: What are the pronunciation*s* (plural) of this word? And which people use which ones? Which pronunciation is used by people who are the most demographically similar to me? (And if you really appreciate the beauty of language: How cool is it that there’s such diversity in language and yet we still understand each other?)