We are super excited to start work on a new mobile game... We have localized so many games, we have lost count. The guesses are somewhere between 207 and 219.

Mark Twain had some interesting observations on German language. Like this one: "In German, all the Nouns begin with a capital letter. Now that is a good idea; and a good idea, in this language, is necessarily conspicuous from its lonesomeness. I consider this capitalizing of nouns a good idea, because by reason of it you are almost always able to tell a noun the minute you see it. You fall into error occasionally, because you mistake the name of a person for the name of a thing, and waste a good deal of time trying to dig a meaning out of it. German names almost always do mean something, and this helps to deceive the student. I translated a passage one day, which said that "the infuriated tigress broke loose and utterly ate up the unfortunate fir forest" (Tannenwald). When I was girding up my loins to doubt this, I found out that Tannenwald in this instance was a man's name."
https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html

Over the past few decades, as efforts to save endangered languages have become governmental policy in the Netherlands (Frisian), Slovakia (Rusyn) and New Zealand (Maori), among many others, Scotland is in an unusual situation. A language known as Scottish Gaelic has become the figurehead for minority languages in Scotland. This is sensible; it is a very old and very distinctive language (it has three distinct r sounds!), and in 2011 the national census determined that fewer than 60,000 people speak it, making it a worthy target for preservation.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/scots-language

Smartphone payment is so ubiquitous in China that wanting to use cash can be a real problem.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2165847/cashless-supermarket-bunch-grapes-and-growing-digital-divide

Facebook last week held a two-day meeting with academics, researchers, and civil society organizations from Myanmar, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere to discuss misinformation and propaganda. Dubbed an “Integrity, Safety, and Conflict Roundtable” and held at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters in California, the meeting included significant discussion of how Facebook can do a better job of monitoring its platform for the misinformation and inflammatory rhetoric that has been linked to violence and social discord in those countries. Another key topic: discussing individualized content policies designed to address cultural nuance in regions
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/daveyalba/facebook-misinformation-myanmar-philippines-sri-lanka

Here is a fun little form to help you learn Turkish. Or at least get a rough idea of its morphological and syntactic complexities.
http://laktoz.yogurtcultures.org/?subject=Abbas&case=dative&predicate=A%C5%9F%C4%B1k&perfective=true&whom=third_person_singular

Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University author of books on discourse analysis including Gender and Conversational Interaction, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, examines the presentation, word-choices and mannerisms of the two testimonies in this week's Senate hearing
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-gender-and-power-played-into-the-kavanaugh-testimonies

Scientists have discovered the brain controls speech production in a similar manner to how it controls the production of arm and hand movements. To do this, researchers recorded signals from two parts of the brain and decoded what these signals represented. Scientists found the brain represents both the goals of what we are trying to say (speech sounds like "pa" and "ba") and the individual movements that we use to achieve those goals (how we move our lips, palate, tongue and larynx). The different representations occur in two different parts of the brain.
"This can help us build better speech decoders for BMIs, which will move us closer to our goal of helping people that are locked-in speak again," said lead author Dr. Marc Slutzky, associate professor of neurology and of physiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a Northwestern Medicine neurologist.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180926140827.htm

Great interview with LocLabs friend John Riccitiello
https://venturebeat.com/2018/09/15/john-riccitiello-interview-how-unity-ceo-views-epics-fortnite-success/

In Venezuela’s faltering economy, prices rose by 223.1% last month alone, according to Ángel Alvarado, an economist and opposition politician (the government has long ceased publishing official statistics). Inflation could reach 1m percent for the full year, according to a (somewhat loose) forecast by the IMF. Such a figure is far from unprecedented, however. In the worst month of its postwar hyperinflation, Hungarian prices rose by 41,900,000,000,000,000%. The government had to print a 100 quintillion note (with 20 zeroes), the highest denomination ever produced.