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languagehat.com
Personal blog · languagehat.comwritingculture
languagehat.com is a personal blog at languagehat.com about writing and culture. Since 2008, 27 different Hacker News readers have linked it 31 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (23) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
A language and linguistics blog that commenters cite for word origins, etymology and usage. Commenters point readers to posts on Larry Trask's baby-word argument and on the word 'jawn'.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 23 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
What Hacker News says?
Some informed speculation about this on languagehat, in the comments: https://languagehat.com/oldest-alphabet/
Comment linking /oldest-alphabet/
on “Evidence of oldest known alphabetic writing unearthed in ancient Syrian city”Submitted The forgotten meaning of "jerk" as a story · 140 points
HN discussionThose sources don't define correctness. Especially Strunk and White, which is pretty well debunked at this point: http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003463.php
Comment linking /archives/003463.php
on “Rich Hickey's Greatest Hits”Submitted A Punic Proverb as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe article claims to translate the Akan term for these clothes: > In Ghana, they call them “obroni wawu” — dead white man’s clothes. However, a language blogger [1] suggests that "obroni" can refer to any foreigner from "beyond the horizon" - so presumably the term encompasses dead East Asian man's clothes too. [1] http://languagehat.com/spruik-kayayei-obroni-wawu/
Comment linking /spruik-kayayei-obroni-wawu/
on “Many of the clothes we donate to charity end up dumped in landfill”Submitted Gobo as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt seems there is no etymology: According to the creator, "I first used the term ‘amorance’ then changed it back to ‘limerence’... It has no roots whatsoever. It looks nice. It works well in French. Take it from me it has no etymology whatsoever." http://www.languagehat.com/archives/001708.php I also find myself feeling slightly uneasy when confronted by a word without etymology. Knowing it was consciously made up i…
Comment linking /archives/001708.php
on “Romantic Love: The problem with Western cultures”Submitted Rue Merdiere as a story · 2 points
HN discussionA few references I could find: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/11/typewri... http://languagehat.com/polyglot-typewriting/
Comment linking /polyglot-typewriting/
on “An Archive of a Different Type”Submitted Poshlost as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThere's nothing even slightly strange about it. The terms are self-recapitulating because parents mistake children's babbling for first words. If anything, it'd be strange if they weren't the same. Take a read of this: http://languagehat.com/trask-on-mama-and-papa/
Comment linking /trask-on-mama-and-papa/
on “Qanat”Submitted The Bookshelf: Oxford Language Books Part 2 as a story · 1 points
HN discussionYou might be interested in the article by Larry Trask linked to here: http://languagehat.com/trask-on-mama-and-papa/
Comment linking /trask-on-mama-and-papa/
on “Qanat”In his introduction to the book, The Best of Cordwainer Smith , J J Pierce recounts a story about Linebarger: "While in Korea, Linebarger masterminded the surrender of thousands of Chinese troops who considered it shameful to give up their arms. He drafted leaflets explaining how the soldiers could surrender by shouting the Chinese words for ‘love’, ‘duty’, ‘humanity’ and ‘virtue’ – words that happened, when pronoun…
Comment linking /chinese-endangered/
on “A science fiction obsession led me to psychological war”Дорогой Мартин Алексеевич![1] 1. https://languagehat.com/sorokins-norma/
Comment linking /sorokins-norma/
on “Launch HN: Martin (YC S23) – Using LLMs to Make a Better Siri”We changed the URL from https://languagehat.com/mcwhorter-on-the-euphemism-treadmill... to the article it points to, but interested readers may want to look at both.
Comment linking /mcwhorter-on-the-euphemism-treadmill/
on “Euphemisms are best changed frequently (2016)”> Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s new translation of 52 Chekhov stories Oh no, oh no, oh no. Their “method” absolutely disagrees with any author with a tight writing style, and Chekhov's tired narration with a tiny drop of irony is tight. https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-pevearsion-o... http://www.thinkaloud.ru/feature/berdy-lan-PandV-e.html https://www.librarything.com/topic/260074 https://r…
Comment linking /janet-malcolm-vs-pv/
on “How Chekhov invented the modern short story”languagehat writes, over at metafilter: Yeah, this is complete bullshit. Actual linguists weigh in in this LH thread [ http://www.languagehat.com/archives/004994.php ]; Marie-Lucie Tarpent writes: The article announces "Eurasiatic" (a hypothetical supergroup originally suggested by Joseph Greenberg of "Amerind" notoriety) as a major discovery by scientists (not linguists) but seems somewhat confused as to its relati…
Comment linking /archives/004994.php
on “Linguists identify 15,000-year-old ‘ultraconserved words’”Not very similar to HN but I am consistently impressed by the amount of knowledge people have on http://languagehat.com/
Comment linking /
on “‘Frenssh’ as it was ‘spak’ in medieval England”https://languagehat.com/kolmogorov/ For the folklorists, the comments-readers, the invertebrate meme-chasers >If we're not in pain, we're not alive https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
Comment linking /kolmogorov/
on “'Equals' has more than one meaning in math”Further reading with better linguistic coverage: http://languagehat.com/jawn/
Comment linking /jawn/
on “The Enduring Mystery of ‘Jawn,’ Philadelphia’s All-Purpose Noun (2016)”A few links for the last item (TRAVESTY). As the source code in the 1st link shows, generation is indeed character-based, as suggested by the examples in the 2nd link. http://wg20.criticalcodestudies.com/index.php?p=/discussion/... https://languagehat.com/travesty/ https://elmcip.net/creative-work/travesty https://www.amazon.com/Sentences-American-Poetry-Charles-Har...
Comment linking /travesty/
on “A Brief History of Markov Chains”Plutarch apparently corrected "Trogodyte" to "Troglodyte." [1] Which piques my interest even more -- she spoke "cave dweller" language? Looks like Herodotus uses the term to refer to a group who lived on the shores of the Red Sea, so that would make sense geographically. [1] http://languagehat.com/polyglot-cleopatra/
Comment linking /polyglot-cleopatra/
on “Was Cleopatra Beautiful? (1997)”There was a good discussion about this on Language Hat a few months ago: http://www.languagehat.com/archives/004914.php
Comment linking /archives/004914.php
on “Creaky Voice: Another Example of Young Women's Linguistic Ingenuity”I would prefer to be approximated as a theoretical engineer, yes ) It was (?iappe?) -- admittedly a misfire -- to encourage (simultaneous) annoyance+delight in the reader's own tendency towards premature generalization BtW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambert_W_function Apropos also of the work of one (post-selected by capital punishment) aristocrat-student of A,VI translated, uncovered by way of chasing down the '…
Comment linking /bumble-puppy/
on “Whitney Stratifications and Intersection Homology (2023) [pdf]”This word has a surprising amount of regional pronunciations. Each of the US, UK, and Australia pronounce it slightly differently. [0] [0] https://languagehat.com/solder/
Comment linking /solder/
on “I hate soldering existentially”just for the heck of it: I stuck "best anagram in English" into Bing ChatGPT and it agreed with that blog. Bing answer: There are many anagrams in English. One of the best anagrams in English is "cinematographer" and "megachiropteran" which means a giant bat. It is 15 letters long, and the only letters that stay together are the E and the R². Source: Conversation with Bing, 5/4/2023 (1) The Best Anagram in English.…
Comment linking /the-best-anagram-in-english/
on “I found the best anagram in English (2017)”78.000, pretty good for a second language; the test's maximum appears to be 85.000. The alternatives to choose between appear to be LLM-generated, you can see a few patterns ("now" and "forever" appear a lot). Years ago, I used to play a similar game that you could keep playing and where you levelled up when you had enough words correct in a row, or down for a single mistake. A fun thing about it was that at very hi…
Comment linking /ghent-vocabulary-test/
on “How many of the 170k English words do you know?”http://www.languagehat.com/archives/000840.php http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ctfonts/WordRecognition....
Comment linking /archives/000840.php
on “Cna yuo raed tihs?”
