This had been languishing in my “opened but still unread” tabs for ages, but I found it interesting – Ursula Le Guin’s ruminations on her use of the pronoun “he” for the genderless (except in kemmer) people of her novel The Left Hand of Darkness, and what other approaches she could have taken instead, since in the years following the book’s publication she’d come to agree that the so-called “generic he” never really existed. Even though this afterword mentions various example texts, with the pronouns altered, that you can read, you can’t actually read them (at least not on that site). But the piece is interesting nonetheless.

Apparently back in 1955, proper research was done to devise a keyboard layout tailor-made for Turkish, with all the most-commonly used letters on the home row and the accented letters used in Turkish given equal status to non-accented ones (and Latin letters that aren’t even used in Turkish like W and Q relegated to the far-flung corners of the board). Apparently Turkish people used to dominate speed typewriting championships because it was just so well-suited to the language, haha.

Unfortunately, this layout doesn’t seem in widespread use today, with Turkey now mostly using a variant of QWERTY . Alas.

Neat article about a sign language that had been completely off the radar to the academic community until a chance question from one study participant during research on ISL (“do you want the sign I use with my friends, or the sign I use with my mother?”). A distinctive sign language arose in the Jewish quarter of the Algerian city of Ghardaia, and there’s still a community in Israel using it today! (And possibly also in France, although it’s not clear.) Cool stuff.

An article about Ajami, a writing system where West African languages like Wolof, Hausa and Fula have been written in the Arabic alphabet. What kind of boggles my mind is that the French clearly saw people using this script… and then just branded them “illiterate” anyway? How much contempt can you have. Ugh.

Interesting Twitter thread about the multitude of different writing systems used to write Hokkien! (Saved on archive.is, because I have very little faith in the longevity of Twitter links these days.) It’s difficult to write in Chinese characters, because about 15% of Hokkien words have no cognate in Man­da­rin, nor an ancestor in Old Chinese. There are a few different systems used to write those words (and sometimes for writing whole texts), including ones based on the Latin alphabet, bopomofo, and apparently a Hangeul-based/inspired script which was new to me. Cool stuff 🙂

An article talking about how accents have shifted over time (generally towards a “standard”, prestige accent) in the US, and how this can feel threatening to people because accents are so bound up in our sense of identity. The article makes a distinction between “dialect loss” (which it argues is bad, according to linguists) and “accent evolution” (which is neutral). I’m not sure how I feel about this, if only because I feel like both phenomena have much the same causes. But I do also feel like there’s value in having a “standard” language form which is readily comprehensible to all. Perhaps we need greater knowledge and acceptance of code-switching 🙂 Along with understanding that where people don’t use local dialects/accents it’s not because they’re inferior, but just because they’re less universally understood…