Skeptics Stack Exchange
Skeptics Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [language]

The specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication.

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Is “Lord Privy Seal” a technical term in documentary film making?

Richard Dawkins has claimed many times in public speeches, especially in reference to the documentary “Expelled”, that documentary filmmakers use the expression “Lord Privy Seal” in a disparaging manner to describe the amateur’s tendency to…
Timwi
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Did World War II propaganda posters tell people to "Speak American", rather than languages of the enemy?

Wikimedia commons entry, claiming a citation to "Una Storia Segreta" by Lawrence Distasi. The licensing metadata from the picture claims that it is a "work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person’s…
Andrew Grimm
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Is dyslexia unheard of in Spain?

I've been told that dyslexia is unheard of in Spain, and presumably other Spanish-speaking cultures, because Spanish is pronounced as it is spelt. Is this true? Example: Cases of dyslexia and illiteracy after four years of schooling are extremely…
Simon Whitaker
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Is Lojban completely unambiguous?

The description from Wikipedia: Lojban (pronounced [ˈloʒban]) is a constructed, syntactically unambiguous human language based on predicate logic, succeeding the project of Loglan. I understand that this is the goal of the language. Has it…
MrHen
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Was this Harry-Potter themed text written solely by a computer program?

A YouTube video caught my eye with the title, "A Robot Wrote A Chapter To A Harry Potter Book, And It's Absolutely Insane." The video claims that a software algorithm created by Botnik Studios was trained on the text of the Harry Potter series, and…
DLosc
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Do the English eat "pork" instead of "pig" because they were servants of the French?

Many online sources make the claim that the strange quirk in the English language of having French-derived terms (pork, beef, veal, mutton) for the meat of the animal, and having German-derived terms (pig/swine, cow, calf, sheep) for the animal…
March Ho
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Does learning Latin first dramatically improve the ability to learn more languages?

I was taught 2 semesters of cold Spanish, but forgot most of it. Does learning Latin first make learning Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, etc. a whole lot faster or easier as some claim. They all stem from latin of course. Any studies on this?
superherosaves
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Was French spelling artificially altered for longer words?

There's a widespread belief that says that the reason for French having so many silent letters is that historically the authors were paid by the letter, so they were tempted to write longer words. This is likely false for a number of reasons, but I…
Vitaly Mijiritsky
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Are there banned words in New York standarized tests?

I just came across a random post on a random news blog saying that several words were banned from New York's standardized tests. This included common words, such as Christmas, dinosaurs, birthdays. I really disbelieved of this so I made a quick…
Alpha
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Are North American children adopting British accents because of Peppa Pig?

Several news items have surfaced today which report that North American children are adopting British accents at a very young age due to watching Peppa Pig episodes. The only source quoted is Romper which does not seem, to me, to be what I would…
Nigel J
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Is the use of X for unknown quantities taken from the Arabic word "shay"?

In this TED Talk, the speaker says that the use of X for unknown quantities was the result of Spanish people taking the Arabic word shay (meaning "thing"), which was used by Arabs to denote unknown quantities, and representing it by the Greek letter…
Daud
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Does requesting a bilingual trial often result in dismissal?

Life hack sites like to claim that requesting a bilingual trial will cause minor cases to be dismissed. I have seen this on multiple sites, but it seems they have a tendency to shut down after a year or two. I can't find an active site right now,…
Drew
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Does reading what you listen parallely improve your ability to speak English?

I can write English well, and can also understand it well (provided someone speaks i a known accent.) For improving my spoken English I have got audio books. I can understand what I am being told by the book. There are many claims on the internet…
Aquarius_Girl
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Does talking in another language actually change your personality?

So I found a photo on facebook: And while I usually don't believe in these facebook "Facts" I took a second to think about it myself since I'm a person that speaks a few languages (we have 4 national languages in Switzerland). What really surprised…
Jutschge
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Is Japanese language "cleaner" than English in terms of spreading coronavirus?

I was watching a video from Abroad In Japan channel where Chris Broad, the creator of that channel talks about a TV show in which "experts" discussed about the reasons why number of cases of covid-19 were low in Japan and this has something to do…
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