Not a large corpus and some are more idioms than just words. Still it's a nice little experiment with interesting entries.

Interesting exploration of where the strong verb system of the English language is coming from.

Interesting exploration about where the alphabet comes from. Interesting debate about the abjad vs alphabet classification in the comments as well.

Very interesting article. Where diacritics come from? Why English doesn't have them?

LLMs training had a bias from the start... and now we got a feedback loop since people are posting generated content online which is then used for training again. Expect idiosyncrasies to increase with time.

This is an excellent piece. Very nice portrait of Emily M. Bender a really gifted computational linguist and really bad ass if you ask me. She's out there asking all the difficult questions about the current moment regarding large language models and so far the answers are (I find) disappointing. We collectively seem to be way too fascinated by the shiny new toy and the business opportunities to pay really attention to the impact on the social fabric of all of this.

Hard not to have at least some ChatGPT related news this week. Plenty of impressive experiments out there... I think this one is hands down the most impressive one. I'm biased though, I like linguistics inspired works.

Indeed, be careful when using "just". It's often doing more harm than anything.