LSPHIL
A thematic portal on language: writing systems, learning, translation, the languages of the Philippines and the words we use for chance.
Seven desks, 85 materials and 9 languages: how writing systems encode speech, what language levels and vocabulary numbers really measure, what translation can and cannot check, the languages of the Philippines, and the vocabulary people use for chance and risk.
Writing systems & orthographyEnglish1004 words
A single Baybayin sign is never just a consonant. Take the curved stroke ᜊ: that shape carries both a /b/ and the vowel /a/ together, so it is read "ba." The reader who wants to write "bi" or "bu" does not choose a different letter. Instead, she places a small mark—a kudlít—either above or below the same base shape, and the vowel shifts.
English · 1004 words · Read
Writing systems & orthographyEnglish915 words
Every writing system boils down to a single decision: what does one written sign stand for? The answer places any unfamiliar script into one of four categories—alphabet, abugida, syllabary, or logography—and tells you where to look it up in the international register.
English · 915 words · Read
Learning & teaching languagesEnglish1074 words
The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages does not measure how long you have studied, how many words you know, or what score you got on a test. It publishes "can-do" descriptors: concrete statements of what a learner can handle in specific situations.
English · 1074 words · Read
Philippine languagesEnglish771 words
The 1987 Constitution is unambiguous: "The national language of the Philippines is Filipino." Article XIV, Section 6 leaves no room for synonyms. Yet Executive Order No. 134, issued in 1937 under President Manuel L.
English · 771 words · Read
Translation & interpretingEnglish1199 words
The word "untranslatable" sells. It promises readers access to feelings no English speaker has ever had, to concepts that lie beyond the reach of their native tongue. The claim is almost always false. Translators do not face a blank wall when they encounter toska, cafuné, or Schadenfreude.
English · 1199 words · Read
How scripts encode a language: abugidas, alphabets, diacritics, spelling norms.
Writing systems & orthographyEnglish1009 words
A dropped accent mark can turn one word into another, garble the rhythm of a sentence, or simply annoy a copy editor. The consequences vary because diacritics do different jobs in different languages: some distinguish homophones, others mark stress or tone, and some exist primarily because a spelling authority says they must.
English · 1009 words · Read
Writing systems & orthographyEnglish987 words
English spelling reform has never failed for lack of good ideas. It has failed because, as the English Spelling Society itself notes, "no-one has the authority to drive spelling reform." The organization, promoting simplified spelling, now pins its hopes on an International English Spelling Congress—a body that does not yet exist and would have no enforcement power if it did.
English · 987 words · Read
Writing systems & orthographyEnglish875 words
A community can use a writing system for centuries and still find it untypeable. Unicode, the standard that governs how text is stored and exchanged, does not automatically include every script that exists.
English · 875 words · Read
What the levels, the vocabulary numbers and the drills actually measure — and what they do not.
Learning & teaching languagesEnglish807 words
The percentage of words in a text that a reader actually knows—what researchers call "lexical coverage"—is the number that determines whether reading flows or stutters. But ask "how many words do you need?" and the answer collapses into confusion unless you first specify the unit of counting. A word family bundles "run," "runs," "running," and "runner" together.
English · 807 words · Read
Learning & teaching languagesEnglish724 words
The interval in a spaced-repetition system is not a magic timer that fixes weak cards. SuperMemo says it schedules each review at the point where the probability of remembering an item drops to 90%, and a successful retrieval earns a longer delay while a failed one brings the card back within days. When a deck stops working, the culprit is rarely the algorithm. It is almost always the card.
English · 724 words · Read
Learning & teaching languagesEnglish1072 words
The argument over mother-tongue instruction in Philippine public schools rarely matches the documents that govern it. Supporters call it a remedy for early-grade dropout; critics call it an obstacle to English. Both sides often treat the policy as a slogan rather than a set of published conditions with specific limits.
English · 1072 words · Read
Filipino, Tagalog, Cebuano and the rest: names, counts, policy, code-switching.
Philippine languagesEnglish997 words
The 2020 Census of Population and Housing reported Tagalog as the language generally spoken in 10,522,507 households, Bisaya/Binisaya in 4.21 million, and Cebuano in 1.72 million. Ethnologue, the reference catalogue maintained by SIL International, lists 184 living languages for the same country. Both figures are accurate. Neither answers the same question.
English · 997 words · Read
Philippine languagesEnglish832 words
The 1987 Constitution draws a deliberate line between national identity and daily governance. Section 6 of Article XIV names Filipino as the national language. Section 7, in the same article, keeps English as an official language unless Congress acts otherwise. This arrangement was designed to survive demographic shifts. It has.
English · 832 words · Read
Philippine languagesEnglish821 words
Bilingual speakers do not flip between languages arbitrarily. Research on Taglish—the alternation between Tagalog and English common in the Philippines—demonstrates that code-switching operates under strict grammatical constraints, occurring primarily at points where the surface structures of both languages align.
English · 821 words · Read
Modes, costs and the limits of every quality check, machine or human.
Translation & interpretingEnglish704 words
Simultaneous interpreters speak while the source speaker continues. Consecutive interpreters wait for pauses—or for the speaker to finish entirely—before rendering the message. This single operational difference governs everything that follows: how long the event runs, how many interpreters you need, and how much information survives the transfer intact.
English · 704 words · Read
Translation & interpretingEnglish862 words
The back-translation test is designed to catch one thing: whether meaning has drifted between the original text and its translation. It is not a seal of quality. The method is a translation of a translated text back into the original language, made by a separate translator who has never seen the source.
English · 862 words · Read
Translation & interpretingEnglish886 words
Fluent output is not evidence of accuracy. That principle sits at the heart of ISO 18587:2017, the international standard governing how human post-editors must handle machine translation output. The standard requires full post-editing to check accuracy and comprehensibility, improve readability, and correct errors—producing output comparable to human translation.
English · 886 words · Read
Reading papers, building corpora, and the archive of the society this site grew from.
Research & academiaEnglish1146 words
Language documentation is not language description. That distinction matters from the first day of fieldwork to the last file uploaded to an archive. A grammar or dictionary describes a language; a documentation corpus preserves it as a reusable, checkable, and ethically governed record. The corpus is the point. Without the deposit, the work is unfinished.
English · 1146 words · Read
Research & academiaEnglish1186 words
A language with two million speakers can be more endangered than one with two thousand. The difference lies in who is learning it at home. UNESCO's framework for assessing language vitality, first published in 2003 and elaborated in the 2009 Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, treats intergenerational transmission as the decisive factor.
English · 1186 words · Read
Research & academiaEnglish104 words
The 2014 LSP National Conference and General Meeting Theme: “Language Education in the Philippines” 24-26 April 2014 Mariano Marcos State University (Batac, Ilocos Norte)
English · 104 words · Read
Material written in Spanish, German, Danish, Dutch, French, Finnish, Hungarian and Portuguese.
Desks in other languagesDeutsch874 words
Die deutsche Großschreibung gilt vielen als archaischer Zwang, eine nationale Marotte ohne erkennbaren Nutzen. Tatsächlich hat sie eine klar umrissene grammatische Funktion: Sie macht Substantive und Substantivierungen im Schriftbild sichtbar.
Deutsch · 874 words · Read
Desks in other languagesDansk641 words
Dansk retskrivning fastlægges af Dansk Sprognævn og offentliggøres i Retskrivningsordbogen, nu i den gældende udgave. Den officielle norm bygger på to hovedprincipper: traditionsprincippet og sprogbrugsprincippet. Førstnævnte bevarer ældre stavemåder, selv når talesproget har bevæget sig videre. Resultatet er et sprog, hvor skrift og udtale lever i stadig større afstand fra hinanden.
Dansk · 641 words · Read
Desks in other languagesNederlands782 words
Nederlands · 782 words · Read
The general desk: vocabulary of chance, odds and persuasion — and the running feed.
Games, risk and the words we useEnglish1091 words
English speakers often throw around "odds," "chance," and "probability" as if they were interchangeable. They are not. The most consequential distinction lies between odds and probability: one measures ratio, the other measures share. Confuse them and you misread risk—sometimes badly.
English · 1091 words · Read
Games, risk and the words we useEnglish853 words
English · 853 words · Read
Games, risk and the words we useEnglish1950 words
English · 1950 words · Read
The running feed of the general desk, newest first.
21 September 2026
17 September 2026
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10 October 2026
8 October 2026
29 September 2026