Just a reminder that if you like what we do repost and tell your friends :)

TIL: Finnish has no separate future tense. The present covers future time. ‘Huomenna sataa’ - literally ‘tomorrow it rains’ which means it will rain tomorrow. Speakers add time words or modals when needed and the pattern is common cross-linguistically!

Lingonaut Build 31 'Tock' Update This change is focused on fixing bugs, improving quality of life and compatibility as well as bringing the course engine in line with Creatonaut 3.4! We've also added additional places to the beta, join while there's space! lingonaut.app/beta

TIL ‘Robot’ is Czech! Karel Capek’s R.U.R. (1920) introduced it, from ‘robota’ meaning ‘forced labour’. His brother Josef coined the word. In the play the robots are lab-made biological workers rather than metal machines, that idea came later.

Some languages don’t have exact words for exact numbers. Piraha in the Amazon uses words roughly meaning ‘small quantity’ and ‘larger quantity’ instead of ‘1' and '2’, and experiments found that speakers approximate amounts but struggle with exact quantities once sets get bigger or go out of sight!

TIL Spanish ‘ñ’ began as shorthand for ‘nn’, kinda like ß being ss in German! Medieval scribes wrote an ’n’ with a small wavy line above it (the tilde) and ‘anno’ became ‘año’. The shorthand later became a distinct letter in Spanish and spread to Galician and Basque too.

TIL Many languages don’t use the verb ‘have’! Instead of ‘I have a book’ they would say ‘at me is a book’. Russian: u menya est’ king. Irish: tá leabhar agam. Hebrew: yesh li sefer. They combine the verb for ‘to be’ with an adposition!

Hindu and Urdu are one spoken language, Hindustani! They’re split apart by script and prestige vocabulary. Hindi uses Devanagari and more Sanskrit loans while Urdu uses Nastaliq and more Persian/Arabic loans. Colloquial speech is mostly mutually intelligible though!

Now is the time to flex that pledge! (Or if you don't have one yet, to grab one!) Should we go with the Android client next or the Web client? You decide! www.patreon.com/posts/142398... Thank you to our patrons for helping keep lingonaut free for everyone!

lingonaut.app/stability-we... Another monthly roundup of our progress!

Sick of the energy update? lingonaut.app, has infinite energy, infinite hearts and is made with infinite heart ❤️ Free for everyone, no paywalls, no mtx and no AI. Join the beta now! lingonaut.app/beta

Icelanders don't really use family surnames! Names are patronymic or matronymic, Jon Einarsson's daughter is Anna Jondottir and his son would be Olafur Jonnson! People are listed and addressed by their first name, and a state Naming Committee approves new given names.

TIL That Korean Hangul was designed, not naturally evolved. In 1443 King Sejong’s scholars made an alphabet where consonants mirror your mouth and tongue, and vowels combine three marks for heaven, earth, human. It was published in 1446 and was built to be easy to learn!

AI-First has always been the same as People-Last

English ‘I’ wasn’t always capital. Old English used ‘ic’. When it shrank to a single ‘i’ in Middle English, scribes wrote it as a capital ‘I’ so the letter wouldn’t get lost in manuscripts, not because the self is special!

We don’t trust mass produced AI generated language learning slop and you shouldn’t either. It’s concerning to see them pop up by the dozen on #langsky overnight by people looking to make a quick buck. Easier to just learn what’s correct in the first place!

‘Huh?’ is near-universal. Across unrelated languages, people use almost the same little word to request a quick repeat. It isn’t innate though, likely convergent evolution under the pressure to get the conversation back on track.

English has one 'blue.' Russian splits it into two basic colors: siniy (dark blue) and goluboy (light blue). Experiments show Russian speakers are faster at telling apart blues that cross this boundary, a power that weakens when verbal rehearsal is blocked!

TIL You can whistle a language! On La Gomera (one of the Canary Islands), Silbo Gomero encodes Spanish into whistles that carry across valleys for kilometres! It’s taught in schools since 1999 and considered a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO

TIL: Sign languages aren’t universal! American Sign Language is historically related to French Sign Language not British Sign Language. That means ASL and BSL are not mutually intelligible, even though both countries use English.

Some languages don’t use left/right. They default to cardinal directions! In Guugu Yimithirr from Australia, people describe everyday locations with north/south/east/west e.g. ‘shift a bit to the east not ‘to your left.’

Not every language counts by tens. Some count by twenties! French 80 = quatre-vingts (4x20). Danish 70 = halvfjerds (3 and a half x20). Basque 60 = hirurogei (3x20). Many base-20 systems likely came from counting on fingers and also toes (20 'digits'), and those habits stuck in the number words!

Lingonaut Build 25 is out and it's our biggest update yet! Read more about it here!: lingonaut.app/build-25-is-... We've also added 1000 new spots to the beta so get in while you still can! lingonaut.app/beta This mission relies on your patronage! patreon.com/lingonaut

Many Indo-European languages avoided the original word for 'bear.' Germanic switched to a euphemism meaning 'the brown one' (Proto-Germanic berô). Slavic uses 'honey-eater' (medvěd). Naming dangerous animals was taboo so people renamed the bear!

The word for tea in almost every language comes from just two roots: tea or cha. If your country got tea by sea trade, you say some version of tea. If it came overland, you say some version of cha. English has both: tea and chai! There's the portuguese though who say chá though they got it by sea

English used to have a singular second-person: 'thou'. 'You' was either the plural or polite just like other languages like Czech, Hindi or German! The polite form won and 'thou' faded that’s why we still say 'you are' not 'you is'.

I wonder why these all share similar pronunciations?

TIL that almost every language uses some variation of ‘mom/mom/ma’ for mother because babies naturally make “ma” sounds when they first start vocalising!

We are sorely in need of ways to spread the word about what we’re trying to do! If you have any ideas or can just repost or share the message please do :)

We plan to be the proof that not everything has to be swallowed and taken apart by venture capitalists to succeed!

Patreon perk upgrades: In an effort to raise more funding for the Android version and web client and also deal with project costs creeping up as we get more learners - we're going to add new perks and start enforcing older perks to make sure that patrons get something in return for their support

Android work begins, Build 25 and much, much more in the latest blog post at: lingonaut.app/android-work...

We have reached 15 000 members on our discord! Join us at: discord.gg/lingonaut

What we've been saying for years has turned out to be true all along, people are sick of Duolingo’s shady and unethical practices despite them saying growth is up And it turns out they might’ve been lying the whole time cbs4indy.com/business/pre...

It's the end of July, and that means the next monthly blog update! Find out what's been happening at Lingonaut and what we intend to do next! You can also view the progress of our courses on our brand new Launchpad website, which you can access from the blog! lingonaut.app/whats-new-wi...

Lingonaut FAQ The language learning app built to teach, not to profit.

New blog post! The monthly wrap-up WNWL (What's new with Lingonaut?) is here again! We are officially in OPEN Beta for iOS! Check the blog at lingonaut.app/whats-new-wi...

🚧Under Construction🚧 A new language learning app with no ads or AI and loads of courses. And the best part... it's completely free! Check back soon for more updates #Lingonaut #UnderConstruction #ComingSoon #Languages #Languagelearning #App #AdFree

New blog post! The monthly wrap-up WNWL (What's new with Lingonaut?) is here with its first edition! Check the blog for the latest info on Lingonaut, beta wave 2, as well as our stance on a certain CEO's alleged statement about "teachers only being good for childcare". lingonaut.app/whats-new-wi...

Great news everyone! After two years of hard work, the beta for Lingonaut has finally been submitted for approval on IOS, and the course creation tool Creatonaut has been released! Read the latest blog post at: lingonaut.app/lingonaut-be...

Finally, a big announcement is here. Go visit our new blog post to see a ton of new information, screenshots, beta-launch schedule and more! lingonaut.app/the-update-t...

New blog post and updates! lingonaut.app/break-a-leg-...

Random Language Adventure – Latin Latin was the language of the Roman Empire, one of, if not the most important ancient civilizations, which has shaped our view of the world, but how much do you actually know about their language? 🧵

Kalaallisut, or Greenlandic is the language spoken by the people of Greenland, and, even though the island the is part of Denmark, it is not related to Danish, or any Indo-European language for that matter!

Today for the MONTH OF LINGONAUT we have another random language adventure - So, German is a West Germanic language which means it's very closely related to Dutch, Afrikaans, Frisian, English, Scots, Yiddish and Luxembourgish.

New blog post out! The month of lingonaut begins: lingonaut.app/blog/

Welcome to the first of many Random Language Adventures! They're dives into lesser spoken or niche languages that have quite the interesting background and history! Today we'll be taking a look at: Esperanto! 🧵