A Very Cool Thing: Astrolabe from Seville, 1224 AD (Oxford HSM inv.50934). On the throne, at the top of the instrument, note the #geometry diagram: it shows the method for bisecting a segment, used here to draw the meridian line. The maker engraved it fully, offering us a glimpse into their process…

Learning about Italian culture, aka how to use “cazzo” in a sentence.

Imagine being a hagfish. It’s actually quite offensive

I would have thought letting your dog lead the lab might fail the students in some ways, but maybe I’m old fashioned

peak fucking performance

“well it depends what the question is” Most evergreen academic reply I swear it works for everything

I would like to ask descriptive linguists not to use "marked" in a vague way. My supervisor Jane Simpson always got the red pen out for that, and I am now following in her footsteps.

Coverage in the Guardian of our latest publication in Royal Society Open Science, with fantastic collaborators Alan McElligott (@amcell.bsky.social), Christian Nawroth (@goatswhostare.bsky.social), Federico Rossano and Simon Townsend. Paper threaded below! www.theguardian.com/science/2026...

These "bilateral" agreements between Israel and the Authority are already de facto dead and have long been and the pretense that they matter anymore is part of what keeps the fiction of a "process" alive. There is no process, there is no state in-waiting, there's one sovereign apartheid regime.

Shameful that so many universities continue to normalise relations with the Israeli regime www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

Unnecessarily anti-Irish intro to Hamilton Walks

🚨 New Publication Alert!🚨 Polysemy and metaphorical extension in an artificial language learning experiment (w/ @elizabethqingzhang.bsky.social & Marek Placiński). Out now in #OpenAcess in Language and Cognition. 🧵1/ #language #linguistics doi.org/10.1017/lang...

analysis of declining linguistics jobs in USA 😬

_Uniform Information Density_ _Working Memory chunking_ ... these seem related, both to do with unit size constraints Any work on this?

Take note of how almost nobody in Europe or Israeli society said a word about how Ben Gvir treats Palestinians who are illegally detained in his fascist prisons. As soon as he records himself doing a tenth of this kind of torture to Europeans, everyone is uproar. Good, but maybe expand the outrage.

One of the main things keeping me going in life is that I really like breakfast.

Don't miss the latest episode of @smwilson.bsky.social's Language Neuroscience Podcast with @rmc-law.bsky.social and @vborghesani.bsky.social teasing the program of #SNL2026! 🍏 open.spotify.com/episode/0zAE... 🍎 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/s...

TWO great jobs in History and Philosophy of Science at Sydney! Rank from Lecturer (Assistant Prof) to Assoc Prof. Particularly interested in candidates working in the areas of early modern science, or science or medicine in Asia, or Indigenous knowledge systems... #HPS #STS #histstm #histsci

"auf" is the most difficult morpheme in German

New preprint by Charles Kemp and myself, comparing quantitative frameworks that seek to measure the functional optimality of languages. osf.io/preprints/ps...

A new version (2.0) of Frank Seifart's Affix Borrowing database, now co-authored with Francesco Gardani: afbo.info

Version 1.0 of the Grammaticon is now online! This has been in the making for over eight years. Quite a few of the entries are still preliminary, but I hope to expand and improve it over the coming months and years. Comments are welcome! An intro text is here: dlc.hypotheses.org/4316

"The origins and evolution of writing: A very brief synthesis" at Cambridge 16:30, 20th May. Zoom in, if you're in a compatible time zone!

has anybody looked at Spain? (research idea)

The Department of Basic Neurosciences of UNIGE and the @nccrlanguage.bsky.social are looking for an Assistant Professor with Tenure Track or Associate Professor in Computational Neuroscience. Full details: jobs.unige.ch/www/wd_porta... #neurojob #academicjob #compneuro

I’m going to put this out there - I have some funds to run lab experiments involving prosody and segmental articulation. I’m happy to collaborate with people who want to do this work but don’t have much funding, especially given the federal funding catastrophe. #linguistics

I'm hiring! 2 x postdocs in Cognitive Anthropology, Archaeology and Linguistics, to work on the cultural history of Australia and Papua. More details in link below, and please do repost or share elsewhere! www.isle.uzh.ch/en/jobs/post...

holy shit

Didn’t finish reading this, any tldr? 😀

Anybody get special sources for PDFs of minority langs of Indonesia?? esp Sumbawa, Osing

Bodily Sensations by null: https://doi.org/10.21428/e2759450.3d8f2887

I tried making a joke to the Swiss parking inspector, „Es gibt auch Regeln für Gandalf“. This did not go well.

While cruelty has always been the point of Trump's whole Administration, nothing highlights that more than dropping a nearly blind elderly man 5 miles from nowhere in freezing weather so that he die alone, afraid, and abandoned. This is Trump's America. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

What have we learned from history? Would people let a Trojan Horse through their gates today?

"cold brew" means coffee if you stress the first word and beer if you stress the second word

Thinking about the relation between certainty and commitment 🤔 If a speaker is certain of a proposition, are they committed to it? Can a speaker have full support for a proposition without being committed to it? (Please help me think, semanticists and philosophers!) #linguistics #philosophy

reading up on semantics to learn that the meaning of „dog“ is DOG #linguistics

How transparent is your research funder? 🧐 In our latest work we introduce the Transparent Reporting Scale (TRS) to evaluate how funders report grant data. It's time for standardized transparency to bridge the "scissor-shaped curve" in neuroscience. www.frontiersin.org/journals/com...

omg everybody go draw a horse this is what the internet was made for gradient.horse

i heard both of these today: "what are we solutioning here" "we don't have a solve for that" nouns and verbs, two ships passing in the night

⭐️⭐️UTAustin alumni call on all ex-students to sign this petition urging UT not to sign the federal government’s higher education compact. UT leaders have still not made their decision about the compact clear.😡 alumni.standforcampusfreedom.org/petitions/un...

Grateful to Ge Song for his generous review of my book. He clearly articulates how the book brought together geosemiotics, sociolinguistics of globalisation, and metrolingualism to build a strong theoretical foundation for #linguisticlandscape. Far from a 'simplistic' field: doi.org/10.1075/japc...

Epic photo

Excited to share that our book "History of Ideas in the Science of AI" (co-authored with Luc Steels and Ann Dooms) is now freely available as #OpenAccess! #OpenScience, #AIResearch, #HistoryOfAI doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

The majority of the writers pulled out, director resigned, festival no longer tenable this year. Great to see writers standing up for human rights and resisting authoritarian bootlickers.

Pathetic Adelaide Writers Week board trying to stop Palestinians from talking about the genocide

Tenure-track Assistant Professor position in computational linguistics at UNIGE / @nccrlanguage.bsky.social The application deadline is around the corner (Jan 15)- don't miss it! linguistlist.org/issues/36/37...

I'm hiring! 2 x PhD positions to work at Uni Zurich with me on "Evolutionary Semantics" for an ERC-funded project. semantically curious MA grads from linguistics, cog psych, anthro encouraged to apply evolvinglanguage.ch/studying-the...