The French phrase 'au jour d'aujourd'hui' says 'today' three times

Anecdota
The French phrase 'au jour d'aujourd'hui' says 'today' three times
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💬Language & words

The French phrase 'au jour d'aujourd'hui' says 'today' three times

In Old French, 'hui', from Latin 'hodie', was enough to say 'today'. It was later reinforced as 'au jour d'hui', 'on the day of this day', which fused into 'aujourd'hui', the modern word for today. So the colloquial phrase 'au jour d'aujourd'hui' stacks the day three times over. Latin 'hodie' also hides in Italian 'oggi' and Spanish 'hoy'.

Académie française – Dire, ne pas dire
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💬Language & words

Whistled Turkish engages both halves of the brain

In Kuşköy, a mountain village in northern Turkey, people talk across valleys by whistling Turkish. A 2015 study showed that whistled Turkish draws on both hemispheres fairly evenly, whereas spoken Turkish relies mostly on the left. The physical form of the signal, it turns out, matters to the brain.

Current Biology
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💬Language & words

Eight-month-olds run statistics on syllables

Speech has no gaps between words. In 1996, researchers played 8-month-old babies a continuous stream of made-up syllables for just two minutes. The infants picked out the 'words' by tracking which syllables tend to follow one another. That's probability calculation, done without a calculator or any visible effort.

Science