"Many psychologists think that we forget languages, and other things, because of "disuse"—the memories that we don’t try to recall very frequently become more deeply buried over time. Which explains why, even though you once aced your French midterm, you can no longer remember how to declare that you would like to go parasailing with Jean-Claude this weekend.

Other studies have shown that forgetting a native language might be an adaptive strategy that helps us learn a second one. In a 2007 study, "native English speakers who had completed at least one year of college-level Spanish were asked to repeatedly name objects in Spanish. The more the students were asked to repeat the Spanish words, the more difficulty they had generating the corresponding English labels for the objects."

"Wynn (ƿ) was incorporated into our alphabet to represent today’s w sound. Previously, scribes used two u characters next to each other, but preferred one character instead and chose wynn from the runic alphabet. The double u representation became quite popular and eventually edged wynn out.
Yogh (ȝ) was historically used to denote throaty sounds like those in Bach or the Scottish loch. As English evolved, yogh was quickly abandoned in favor of the gh combo. Today, the sound is fairly rare. Most often, the gh substitute is completely silent, as in though or daughter.
Ash (æ) is still a functional letter in languages like Icelandic and Danish. In its original Latin, it denoted a certain type of long vowel sound, like the i in fine. In Old English, it represented a short vowel sound — somewhere between a and e, like in cat. In modern English, æ is occasionally used stylistically, like in archæology or medæval, but denotes the same sound as the letter e.
Ethel (œ) also once represented a specific pronunciation somewhere between the two vowels o and e, though it was originally pronounced like the oi in coil. Like many clarifying distinctions, this letter also disappeared in favor of a simpler vowel lineup (a, e, i, o, u) with many different pronunciations.
Eth (ð): The y in ye actually comes from the letter eth, which slowly merged with y over time. In its purest form, eth was pronounced like the th sound in words like this, that or the. Linguistically, ye is meant to sound the same as the but the incorrect spelling and rampant mispronunciation live on.
Thorn (þ)" is in many ways the counterpart to eth. Thorn is also pronounced with a th sound, but it has a voiceless pronunciation — your vocal cords don’t vibrate when pronouncing the sound — like in thing or thought.
Today, the same th letter combo is used for both þ and ð sounds. There is a pronunciation difference — thorn is a voiceless pronunciation and eth is voiced — but that’s just something you pick up as you learn to speak. Of course, you’ll never hear about this in school, because that’s English for you."

Many reasons to learn a foreign language. Some will warm your heart.

In the heartbreaking aftermath of the Ghost Ship fire, LocLabs will be donating a portion of the this week's revenues to help the families affected.

"Taa, also known as !Xoon, is part of the Khoisan language group, spoken in the Kalahari Desert and hardly anywhere else. All Khoisan languages use click consonants, which were featured in the hit 1980 film “The Gods Must Be Crazy.”

The five click types in !Xoon are the dental click (written with the symbol ǀ), which is something like the tut-tut sound English speakers make; the alveolar click (written ǃ), made with the tip of the tongue against the alveolar ridge); the palatal click (ǂ), made with a flat tongue broadly placed on the palate; the lateral click (ǁ), like the sound equestrians use to communicate with horses; and the rarest click of all in the Khoisan languages, the bilabial click (ʘ), made with both lips."

OK, this note is delayed by a month and a half: we just localized our 200th game!!!! Wow, go LocLabbers!

Great news about our friends and collaborators

Great short film about words, language and expression

More reasons to study languages...

“Adjectives absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac.
Mixing up the above phrase feels inexplicably wrong (a rectangular silver French old little lovely whittling green knife…), though nobody can say why. It’s almost like secret knowledge we all share.
Learn the language in a non-English-speaking country, however, and such “secrets” are taught in meticulous detail.” - excerpt from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase by Mark Forsyth.