A Handful of Language Links

Learn to read Korean in 15 minutes, in comic form, by Ryan Estrada. (Hat tip to All Things Linguistic.)

Written by psycholinguist Jessica Love, Psycho-Babble is the Thursday flavor of the Daily Scholar column, which is part of Phi Beta Kappa’s online magazine American Scholar. In what I take to be a misguided attempt to be timeless, none of the posts have dates on them, but if they come out every Thursday, this column seems to have been going for about a year and a half. I’ve been browsing through the columns, and have enjoyed all the ones I’ve read. But I’m linking to this one, on the past tense of irregular verbs like pet, because I’ve written about this topic a few times. (Incidentally, I guess I shouldn’t complain about the use of the word blog to refer to both blogs and blog posts, if column can refer to both the column space that a writer fills, and the individual pieces they fill it with.  But it still sounds wrong to me!)

Michael Erard wants to create the online Sports Illustrated of linguistics. He’s calling it Schwa Fire, and has started a Kickstarter campaign to launch it. As of today, there are 13 days left in the campaign, and it’s 75% of the way toward the $25,000 goal. I’ve made a modest pledge, and invite you language enthusiasts to do the same.

From James Harbeck, a history of click sounds in African languages.

Just in time for both Thanksgiving and Hanukkah, for the only time in your lifetime, Nancy Friedman briefs us on the stupid-sounding but surprisingly interesting word Thanksgivukkah.

Of course, if it’s language link collections done right that you want, Stan’s the man to see, as always.