Humanities
Language as a natural object — structured, learnable, and far stranger than it looks.
10 fields · 91 topics · 159 curated works
The sounds of speech and the systems behind them.
Foundations & Overviews · Articulatory Phonetics · Acoustic Phonetics · The IPA · Phonemes & Allophones
How words and sentences are built.
Foundations & Overviews · Word Formation · Inflection & Derivation · Parts of Speech · Constituency & Phrase Structure
Meaning, literal and otherwise.
Foundations & Overviews · Lexical Semantics · Compositional Semantics · Reference & Deixis · Implicature
How languages change and how relatedness is proved.
Foundations & Overviews · Sound Change · The Comparative Method · Proto-Indo-European · Language Families
Language as a marker of identity and power.
Foundations & Overviews · Dialects & Variation · Register & Style · Code-Switching · Language & Class
Language in the mind and how it gets there.
Foundations & Overviews · First Language Acquisition · Second Language Acquisition · Critical Period Hypothesis · Sentence Processing
The technology of recording speech.
Foundations & Overviews · Origins of Writing · Alphabets · Logographic Systems · Abjads & Abugidas
Language processed by machine.
Foundations & Overviews · Corpus Linguistics · Parsing (Linguistic) · Machine Translation (Linguistic) · Speech Recognition
The applied side — acquisition methods, comprehensible input, and translation as a set of choices, not one answer.
Foundations & Overviews · Language Learning Methods · Comprehensible Input · Vocabulary Acquisition · Pronunciation Training
What is being lost, and what it contains.
Foundations & Overviews · Language Death · Language Documentation · Revitalisation Efforts · Linguistic Diversity
No prior grounding assumed.
A Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling
Benjamin Franklin · 1779
Proposes discarding redundant letters and adding new ones so that English spelling represents pronunciation directly, on the grounds that a phonetic…
+25 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Preface to Ovid's Epistles
John Dryden · 1680
Divides translation into metaphrase, paraphrase and imitation, and argues paraphrase, keeping the sense but not the words, is the right course…
+37 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Über das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache
Franz Bopp · 1816
Compares the verb conjugation systems of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic and argues their systematic correspondences prove common…
+94 more at this level
12 of 159 works
Benjamin Franklin
Proposes discarding redundant letters and adding new ones so that English spelling represents pronunciation directly, on the grounds that a phonetic alphabet would be faster to learn and harder to misread.
William Jones
Observes that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin share grammatical structure too systematic for coincidence and proposes they descend from a common source language now lost, the founding observation of Indo-European studies.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Matthew Arnold
Argues a translator of Homer must be judged not against the target language's literary taste but against how a competent scholar hears the original, and that Homer's rapidity, plainness and nobility have each been sacrificed by past translators in turn.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Isaac Taylor
Argues that place names fossilise successive layers of settlement and conquest, so reading their etymology carefully recovers population movements that have left no other historical trace.
link checked 17 Sept 2026L. L. Zamenhof
Proposes a deliberately regular grammar and a vocabulary built from recognisable European roots, arguing an invented auxiliary language can lower the cost of international communication if, unlike earlier schemes, it is actually put into use.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Otto Jespersen
Argues that English's vocabulary and even parts of its grammar were reshaped less by internal drift than by successive waves of contact with Norse, French and Latin, and treats borrowing as a normal engine of language change.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Edward Sapir
Argues that languages can be classified by the formal type of structure they use to build words and sentences, independent of whether they are historically related.
about 5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Harold E. Palmer
Argues effective language study balances conscious study with unconscious habit-forming practice, and sets out the psychological conditions, such as spaced repetition and graded difficulty, under which each works best.
about 3 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026H. W. Fowler
Lays out judgments on disputed points of English usage, defending careful distinctions between similar words as aids to clear thought, and became the model prescriptive work that later descriptivist linguistics defines itself against.
Warren Weaver
Proposes treating translation as a cryptographic decoding problem, arguing that a text in one language can be seen as the same message encoded, and that wartime code-breaking statistics could help recover it.
Stephen D. Krashen
Argues a second language is acquired only from input a learner can understand slightly above their current level, and that conscious grammar study helps monitor speech but does not itself build competence.
link checked 17 Sept 2026National Reading Panel (NICHD)
Argues, from a meta-analysis of experimental reading research, that systematic phonics instruction combined with explicit phonemic-awareness teaching produces reliably better reading outcomes than whole-language instruction alone.
link checked 17 Sept 2026