Interesting little wrinkles, hidden sound patterns and other mysteries

Social media round-up for September 23, 2016

This week we read about how our Language Has ‘Interesting Little Wrinkles,’ according to linguists over at NPR.
We read about Punjabi on the About World Languages blog.
On a blog called Yaziky, we read “The Brain Benefits of Learning a Second Language” and learned about what happens in our heads when we change what’s coming out of our mouths.
This week Languages Around the Globe had a good piece on overcoming the fear of speaking a 2nd language (embarrassing mistakes are embarrassing, but not really a big deal!)
“How Neural Machine Translation Can Unlock Europe’s Digital Single Market” over on Slator is pretty interesting, especially if you haven’t read much about neural networks yet.
The words we invent might not just be up to chance, it turns out. This Washington Post article was all about how our biology might have (and still does) affect the way that humans invent words, even in very different languages.
This is fascinating! There are hidden sound patterns that could overturn years of linguistic theory, at The Guardian.
Mandarin is taking off in England, where students across the country are beginning to study the language intensively. We saw the story on Education Magazine.
Another thoughtful piece on the Paris Review this week, “Back to School with the Übermensch, Nietzsche on education, inequality, and translation”.
And finally we read about First Nation of Cree people overcoming funding hurdles in their language revitalization efforts on Intercontinental Cry.