Following the Sounds of Poetry
There are multiple pathways from Anne Carson’s poetry to Ross Gay’s prose. One need only listen, the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona in Tucson reminds us, and follow…
AI Threatens Literary Translation
The etymology of the word translation—“to carry across”—conjures an image of physical labor. It is deeply relational, requiring at least two bodies, those of an author and of the person…
Artificial Intelligence, Automation, Work, and Algorithms | Matteo Pasquinelli and Richard Hames
What is AI? A dominant view describes it as the quest "to solve intelligence"—a solution supposedly to be found in the secret logic of the mind, such as in its…
Allusionist 205. Lexicat, part 2: now with added Dog
n Lexicat part 1, we met the author Mary Robinette Kowal and her cat Elsie, and learned about how they communicate via a set of buttons programmed with words. In…
the definition of words in relation to power
the definition of violence and who gets to use it and how
Things we tend to get wrong about language
everyone has an accent
“blah, blah, blah…”
“Blah, blah, blah” and “yada, yada, yada” have had plenty written about them. But there’s a longtime cousin of these phrases that’s much less understood. We use it all the…
Easing into multilingualism
Mastering six languages sounds like a slog, right? But in some corners of Europe, it happens—maybe not effortlessly, but more easily than in, say, Ohio. Gaston Dorren grew up speaking…
It’s not yee old it’s the old: the þ in old English
Thorn or þorn (Þ, þ) is a letter in the Old English, Old Norse, Old Swedish and modern Icelandic alphabets, as well as modern transliterations of the Gothic alphabet, Middle…
No such thing as the oldest language
It's easy to find claims that certain languages are old or even the oldest, but which one is actually true? Fortunately, there's an easy (though unsatisfying) answer: none of them!…