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The mismatch between English phonemes and graphemes is often treated as a defect to be corrected. A phonological analysis of how orthographies evolve shows that the gap is not only inevitable but structurally informative — and that the languages with the most "irregular" spellings are often those with the richest phonological histories.
"The horse raced past the barn fell." You understood that incorrectly the first time. The reason you did — and the reason you can now reparse it — reveals how incremental sentence processing works, why syntactic ambiguity is the norm rather than the exception, and what happens when the parser commits too early.
Approximately 40% of the world's 7,000 languages are endangered. Each one that disappears takes with it a unique grammatical structure, a unique phonological system, and unique ways of categorising the world. A sociolinguistic account of why languages die, what is lost when they do, and what the documentation movement is actually managing to preserve.
Paul Grice's cooperative principle — that we assume speakers are being relevant, truthful, informative, and clear — explains both why human conversation works and precisely why large language models so often fail at it. An application of classical pragmatic theory to the problems of computational communication.
Language is the object. Linguistics is the discipline. LOOM is the briefing.
LOOM covers linguistics as a rigorous scientific field — not as a set of grammar rules, not as a guide to "speaking properly," and not as pop etymology. The science of how language works is among the most interesting and under-covered areas of human knowledge. LOOM exists to change that, four minutes at a time.
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