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Video featuring British historical linguist and Early Modern English scholar, David Crystal, and his son, Ben Crystal, speaking about their work in re: speaking Shakespeare's words as they originally sounded.

Including corpora of historical and contemporary American English, British English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

"Might people who write only by printing - in block letters, or perhaps with a sloppy, squiggly signature - be more at risk for forgery? Is the development of a fine motor skill thwarted by an aversion to cursive handwriting? And what happens when young people who are not familiar with cursive have to read historical documents like the Constitution?"

Historical linguists agree that Japanese is a Japonic language, but do not agree further about the origin of the Japanese language; there are several competing theories: Japanese is a relative of extinct languages spoken by historic cultures in what are now the Korean peninsula and Manchuria.

Linguistic scientists have now identified the most confusing sayings in the British-English language. Most of these phrases come from historical events and military slang.

The letter H used to be pronounced "haitch" instead of "aitch". There are words in Old English that start with H, and dropping the H was popular until the 1700s. The name of the letter H itself was one of these words that dropped the beginning H. This article says that the original letter name, "haitch" is a better name because letters with names that begin with the sound they make are much easier for kids to learn that letters with names that end with their sound or letters with names that have no connection to their sound.

Article about debate about Hawaii Creole in Hawaii public schools. Governor Cayetano quoted, "The only time we should be using pidgin English in the public schools is when they're studying pidgin itself, from a historical or cultural point of view."

Article explores the findings of biologist Mark Pagel: some of the words most commonly used today may have derived from a common protolanguage. The Washington Post has an interactive feature with sound samples of some of the ultraconserved words: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/words-that-last/.

Mark Pagel, at the University of Reading, talks about ultra-conserved words--words that have survived 10K years: I, ashes, woman, even possibly spit. He theorizes that such words derive from a common protolanguage.

A linguistics researcher at the Macquarie University in Australia has discovered that the language, known as Burushaski, which is spoken by about 90,000 people who reside in a remote area of Pakistan, is Indo-European in origin. Prof Ilija Casule's discovery, which has now been verified by a number of the world's top linguists, has excited linguistics experts around the world.

The historical origins of 6 swear words.

Linguist John McWhorter links Donald Trump's use of casual speech as one of the reasons for his popular appeal. Even Trump's penchant for Twitter is understandable: the 140-character limit creates a way of writing that, like texting, diverges as little as possible from talking. America's relationship to language has become more informal by the decade since the 1960s, just as it has to dress, sexual matters, culinary habits, dance and much else. Given this historical context, we have to realize that Trump's talking style isn't as exotically barbaric as it looks on the page - the oddness is that it winds up on the page at all. And second, we have to understand that his fans' not minding how he talks is symptomatic of how all of us relate to formality nowadays. Language has just come along with it.

UH-Manoa's Institute for Hawaiian Language Research and Translation provides access and research capacity into the extensive archive of Hawaiian language materials, making more than a century of historical documentation about Hawaiian knowledge and experience available for study. Browse through the Hawaiian Language Newspaper database to view side-by-side scans of original Hawaiian language articles, along with their English translation!

"Evidence for a forgotten ancient language which dates back more than 2,500 years, to the time of the Assyrian Empire, has been found by archaeologists working in Turkey. ... His analysis systematically rules out not only common languages from within the Assyrian Empire, but also other languages of the time -- including Egyptian, Elamite, Urartian or West Semitic. Even at its most generous, his assessment suggests that only 15 of the legible names belong to a language previously known to historians. ... More convincing is the theory that the language in question may have been spoken by a people from somewhere else in the Assyrian Empire who were forcibly moved by the administration." More coverage: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/ancient-language-discovered-on-clay-tablets-found-amid-ruins-of-2800-year-old-middle-eastern-palace-7728894.html Link to the study: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1086/664450?uid=3738032&uid=2132&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=56160246193

Hawaiian nonprofit organization Awaiaulu, Inc. is in the midst of a massive translation project fueled by history, newspapers, and volunteers, that aims to bridge the gap between Hawaii's past and present. About 100 Hawaiian-language newspapers published from 1834 to 1948 are being translated by roughly 3,000 volunteers.

This cool British Library link, enhanced with images, brief historical synopses, and transcripts, comes courtesy of Michelle Skinner: you can explore the evolution of the English Language by literary events, key works, and letters/newspapers/chronicles.

Article discusses the Manti Te'o catfishing incident in historical context, examining the origin of the term "catfish", as well as other lexical terms that've been used to describe the duplicitous mind-games people play.

Research by professor Ilija Casule of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia shows that Burushaski, a language spoken by about 90,000 people in a remote area of Pakistan is Indo-European in origin, and not a linguistic isolate, as previously thought. He explains how 20 years of research has tied this isolated group of people to a migration that started in the Balkans and moved East 3,000 years ago.