A linguist's notebook
Linguist Alexander Piperski's Russian-language channel: short notes on language in the wild, from shop signs and typos to football shirts, Amharic and AI.
What it is
"O slovakh i ne tolko" ("On words and more") is the Telegram channel of Russian linguist Alexander Piperski, described in the bio simply as linguistic notes. It is not a course or a word-of-the-day feed. It is the notebook of someone who notices language where the rest of us walk right past it. Posts are in Russian.
Why we picked it
The notes are short and wonderfully varied. A Deutsche Bahn ad where the joke hinges on "mit 26" meaning either "at 26 years old" or "with 26 people". A first-grade Amharic textbook and an unexpected problem with syllabic scripts: not every symbol has a handy picture-word to go with it. An observation that Russian footballers who move abroad suddenly get called by first name rather than surname. Player names on shirts in a match between Red Star Belgrade and Hapoel Beer Sheva: Cyrillic on one side, Hebrew script on the other.
Bigger topics show up too, such as computational literary studies and how neural networks analyse Russian poetry, or how large language models handle linguistics olympiad problems. And some posts are just funny, like a mock-serious rule about ordering ice-cream scoops in reverse, or a grammar pedant in Barcelona gloating over the "misspelling" cervesa until he remembers Catalan. He posts only a few times a month, and each one is worth opening.
Where to start
- Find the post about names on football shirts; it shows how a linguist watches a match.
- Read the note on the Amharic primer.
- Try the piece on neural networks and Russian poetry if you like text analysis.
- Play the game on the Russian National Corpus site that he linked to.
Who it's for
Anyone who enjoys language without the lecturing. Students thinking about linguistics or training for olympiads. People living abroad who notice their own speech drifting. You will need Russian, though the examples from German, Catalan and Amharic make it fun for polyglots.
Quick answers
Who writes it? Linguist Alexander Piperski.
Do I need a linguistics background? No. The notes are easy to follow and light on jargon.
How often does it post? A few times a month.
