The weird way language effects our sense of time and space

If you were asked to walk diagonally across a field, would you know what to do? 

Or what if you were offered £20 ($23) today or double that amount in a month, would you be willing to wait? And how would you line up 10 photos of your parents if you were instructed to sort them in chronological order? Would you place them horizontally or vertically? 

In which direction would the timeline move? 

 These might seem like simple questions, but remarkably, your answers to these questions are likely to be influenced by the language, or languages, you speak.

 Read more 

Today is a palindrome and an ambigram

If you are in a part of the world that presents dates in the day-month-year format, today is a palindrome, it reads the same forwards and backwards, and an ambigram—when flipped it also reads the same. 

Please celebrate accordingly.

 via

 

There are some languages where deploying one tiny little phrase unlocks doors.

It’s a phrase that “makes Japan go around,” according to Shihoko Goto, senior associate at the Woodrow Wilson Center, a US think tank, referring to a commonplace (yet ambiguous) Japanese phrase: ‘yoroshiku onegaishimasu’.
 It’s a crucial, constantly used term in Japan heard every single day in thousands of contexts.
But it’s really hard to come up with a simple, easily translatable definition.
 And some foreigners might find it completely baffling.
 Read more

 

What your handwriting says about you

Cursive script for the Roman alphabet can vary from country to country and can reveal much about where and how you were taught, writes Adrienne Bernhard.

 

Inuktitut does have a written language, but it’s just not an alphabet.

Instead, as Tom Scott explains, it uses a related system of symbols to express sounds called an abugida. This writing system is in use in the far north of Canada and was originally invented by Christian missionaries. Inuktitut—which can use one compound word to say the equivalent of an English sentence—is built on consonant/vowel pairs. In order to accommodate the language’s sounds and structure, a new set of symbols was developed. (Because different parts of the Arctic were colonized at different times though, Inuktitut is only somewhat comprehensible by people in Alaska or Greenland.) In written Inuktitut, a letter’s shape determines the consonant sound while its rotation shows the vowels that follows it, e.g. ᐃ or ᐊ. Diacritical marks tell a reader if the vowel sound is long or short, and superscripted symbols show how the sound ends, like the ᖅ in that stop sign image. As a writing system it’s both elegant and alien, so if this is too difficult to visualize, check out Tom’s video here.