nikhil.io

nine things tagged “language

Note 0008

“Ni lerdo, Ni Perezoso” My co-worker from Argentina shared this idiom after another delivered some delightful Friday Value™. It means “neither slow nor lazy” and is commonly used to describe people who attend to a situation quickly, decisively, and sometimes unexpectedly, with no hesitation.…

“Translanguaging” is the act of interleaving elements of two or more languages together to communicate more effectively.

Very common in India. And that article is from a journal that offers EAL news. EAL (English as an Additional Language) is not the same as ESL (English as a Second Language). EAL is favored above ESL among the language pedagogy community: Why? Because sometimes it is not clear what an individual’s…

Telugu Script Components

Telugu is a phonetic language, written from left to right, with each character representing generally a syllable. There are 52 letters in the Telugu alphabet: 16 Achchulu which denote basic vowel sounds, 36 Hallulu which represent consonants. In addition to these 52 letters, there are several sem…

Stop Words

In computing, stop words are words which are filtered out before or after processing of natural language data (text). Though “stop words” usually refers to the most common words in a language, there is no single universal list of stop words used by all natural language processing tools, and indee…

Naughty Letter Frequencies in English

Here’s a community-maintained "List of Dirty, Naughty, Obscene, and Otherwise Bad Words" across various languages on Github. I was curious about a naïve frequency distribution of consonants across the English-language corpus (NSFW, obviously) and wrote a small script. Here are the results…