John Mansfield

Our Anthropological Linguistics group at Uni Zurich has a webpage now: www.isle.uzh.ch/en/AnthroL.h...

*The overuse of the word "delve" has faded out of Delvish, but Delvish still has its three identifying properties of surface competence, asymmetry of effort, and mass producibility, says the overworked human editor silentroom.media/the-craft/br...

Cool: Interindividual vocal tract diversity influences the phonetic diversification of spoken languages journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

You can pick out how each person behind him is either dead inside or extremely uncomfortable

Border Collie and Aussie trade calming signals before they play, proof that dogs talk peace before they talk business.

Traditional extracurricular activities in France www.theguardian.com/world/2026/s...

New PhD-opportunity at Aarhus University with a project investigating the cognitive correlates of having no inner speech. Supervised by Johanne Nedergaard and yours truly. Deadline 11 November. Starting date 1 February 2027. Get in touch if you want to know more. phd.arts.au.dk/applicants/o...

Wtaf is this question my university just asked me about my project?

Today in linguistics www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Meanwhile Australian govt maintains normal diplomatic relations with the ethnic cleansing regime, and some universities continue to collaborate www.theguardian.com/world/2026/s...

Can’t overstate how much I hate these

If you like reading about very little-known languages, here are some notes on the Bneraf language, from the Tor family of NW Papua. See especially the verb inflection section! langwidj.org/preprints/Ma...

Hi new PhDs! I'll soon advertise for a post-doc, but would be happy to receive informal inquiries immediately, as getting the official ad up will take a minute. Looking for strong computational & MEG analysis skills. Email me if this sounds like you and you'd like to join us! @snlmtg.bsky.social

Being in Indonesia is like, I can't eat the sambal, but I can't not eat the sambal. I go through this every night.

Village I’m currently working with needs a writing system, they want to use “h” for a weak schwa-like vowel, giving e.g. “athk” as disyllabic word. Seems like an unusual choice, but I guess ok?

Berik (Tor Family, western Papua) has incredibly cool time and space inflection. gives us words like: tiel - “I came from the west ( a long time ago)” Pictured: Berik man, Hanok Borom

video call with a Papuan friend: “Good morning brother, you look very beautiful.” YES this is how we should do conversation.

First up, REASONING WITH CONCEPTS: Conceptual Spaces as a Framework by Peter Gärdenfors and Matías Osta-Vélez, just published this spring. mitpress.mit.edu/978026205340...

Working with native Abkhaz speakers has so long been a dream of mine and I get to do this now. :) The most based interaction: Abkhaz granny: Are there Abkhaz speakers in India? Me: No. Abkhaz granny: Now there will be.

I'm really happy to see the Top End Language Statement is now released. Starting in 2022, people from 10+ different communities across the Top End, speaking a wide range of different languages, worked together to develop this statement. It's an impressive piece of coordinated language activism.

A Very Cool Thing: Astrolabe from Seville, 1224 AD (Oxford HSM inv.50934). On the throne, at the top of the instrument, note the #geometry diagram: it shows the method for bisecting a segment, used here to draw the meridian line. The maker engraved it fully, offering us a glimpse into their process…

Learning about Italian culture, aka how to use “cazzo” in a sentence.

Imagine being a hagfish. It’s actually quite offensive

I would have thought letting your dog lead the lab might fail the students in some ways, but maybe I’m old fashioned

peak fucking performance

“well it depends what the question is” Most evergreen academic reply I swear it works for everything

I would like to ask descriptive linguists not to use "marked" in a vague way. My supervisor Jane Simpson always got the red pen out for that, and I am now following in her footsteps.

Coverage in the Guardian of our latest publication in Royal Society Open Science, with fantastic collaborators Alan McElligott (@amcell.bsky.social), Christian Nawroth (@goatswhostare.bsky.social), Federico Rossano and Simon Townsend. Paper threaded below! www.theguardian.com/science/2026...

Shameful that so many universities continue to normalise relations with the Israeli regime www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

Unnecessarily anti-Irish intro to Hamilton Walks

🚨 New Publication Alert!🚨 Polysemy and metaphorical extension in an artificial language learning experiment (w/ @elizabethqingzhang.bsky.social & Marek Placiński). Out now in #OpenAcess in Language and Cognition. 🧵1/ #language #linguistics doi.org/10.1017/lang...

analysis of declining linguistics jobs in USA 😬

_Uniform Information Density_ _Working Memory chunking_ ... these seem related, both to do with unit size constraints Any work on this?

One of the main things keeping me going in life is that I really like breakfast.

Don't miss the latest episode of @smwilson.bsky.social's Language Neuroscience Podcast with @rmc-law.bsky.social and @vborghesani.bsky.social teasing the program of #SNL2026! 🍏 open.spotify.com/episode/0zAE... 🍎 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/s...

TWO great jobs in History and Philosophy of Science at Sydney! Rank from Lecturer (Assistant Prof) to Assoc Prof. Particularly interested in candidates working in the areas of early modern science, or science or medicine in Asia, or Indigenous knowledge systems... #HPS #STS #histstm #histsci

"auf" is the most difficult morpheme in German

New preprint by Charles Kemp and myself, comparing quantitative frameworks that seek to measure the functional optimality of languages. osf.io/preprints/ps...

A new version (2.0) of Frank Seifart's Affix Borrowing database, now co-authored with Francesco Gardani: afbo.info

Version 1.0 of the Grammaticon is now online! This has been in the making for over eight years. Quite a few of the entries are still preliminary, but I hope to expand and improve it over the coming months and years. Comments are welcome! An intro text is here: dlc.hypotheses.org/4316

"The origins and evolution of writing: A very brief synthesis" at Cambridge 16:30, 20th May. Zoom in, if you're in a compatible time zone!

has anybody looked at Spain? (research idea)

The Department of Basic Neurosciences of UNIGE and the @nccrlanguage.bsky.social are looking for an Assistant Professor with Tenure Track or Associate Professor in Computational Neuroscience. Full details: jobs.unige.ch/www/wd_porta... #neurojob #academicjob #compneuro

I'm hiring! 2 x postdocs in Cognitive Anthropology, Archaeology and Linguistics, to work on the cultural history of Australia and Papua. More details in link below, and please do repost or share elsewhere! www.isle.uzh.ch/en/jobs/post...

holy shit

Didn’t finish reading this, any tldr? 😀