A few days ago I posted about colour coding languages, and mentioned that a lot of words seem to come from Old English.
In case you’re wondering what exactly Old English sounds like, take a look at this video, which was filmed at West Stowe Anglo-Saxon Village in England. In addition to reconstructed Anglo-Saxon houses, the village stages re-enactments of Anglo-Saxon life.
Can you understand Old English?
An ancient language which could shed light on some of history’s first ‘barbarians’ has been discovered on clay tablets in Turkey.
Archaeologists excavating the site of an Assyrian imperial governors’ palace in the city of Tusha uncovered the tablets, which reveal the names of 60 women. When studied in detail, archaeologists realised the names didn’t bear any resemblance to the thousands of Middle Eastern names already known to researchers.
Because ancient Middle Eastern names are normally composites, made-up, in full or abbreviated form, of ordinary words in the relevant local lexicon, the unique nature of the tablet’s 45 mystery names is seen by scholars as evidence of a previously unknown language.
The clay tablet text originally formed part of the palace’s archive – used by local Assyrian imperial officials to record their administrative, political and economic decisions and actions.
The 60 women (including the 45 with evidence of the previously unattested language) were almost certainly being deployed by the palace authorities for some economic purpose (potentially a female-associated craft activity like weaving). Indeed the text mentions that some of them were being allocated to specific local villages. (Source: Independent)
Linguistics experts will now work alongside archaeologists to try and identify the mystery language, and see if it has links to other known languages from the era.
Thinking in a foreign language leads people to make more rational decisions, according to researchers at the University of Chicago.
Featured in the current issue of Psychological Science, the study found that people have less emotional ties to a foreign language, meaning they have a more rational thought process. Their emotional ties to their native language impedes logical thought, according to the study’s authors.
The study, titled “The Foreign Language Effect: Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases”, used previous research showing that people are naturally risk-averse. In one experiment, researchers asked college students to make their decision in (recently learned) Spanish; the test showed that the students were more likely to take a bet in Spanish than in English. This result has potential benefits:
“People who routinely make decisions in a foreign language might be less biased in their savings, investment and retirement decisions, as they show less myopic loss aversion,” the authors wrote. ”Over a long time horizon, this might very well be beneficial.” (Source: Huffington Post)
Another reason to learn a second language!
Feeling a little lazy with your language learning? Can’t be bothered to brush up on the local lingo for your summer holiday? Help is at hand.
This phrasebook t-shirt could be the solution to all your problems! No need for that pesky phrasebook or trying to make yourself understood through complicated hand signals. Just point at your chest, and the easy-to-understand, international airport style graphics will tell the locals what you need right now.
Sadly the t-shirt is no longer for sale, so you’ll just have to struggle through. Would you buy one if it was for sale?
(Source: Gizmodo)
Mark this on the list of “things I didn’t know”: Full moons have names!
According to a post on Space.com, this tradition dates back a few hundred years, to Native Americans of what is now the northern and eastern United States, who gave names to moons in order to keep track of seasons. The name given to the moon was applied to the full month in which it appeared. European settlers followed this custom, and also created their own names.
Here are the names and times for the next couple of months:
May 5, 11:35 p.m. EDT – Full Flower Moon. Flowers are abundant everywhere at this time. May’s full moon was also known as the Full Corn Planting Moon or the Milk Moon. The moon will also be at perigee just 25 minutes after turning full, at 12:00 a.m. EDT on May 6, at a distance of 221,801 miles (356,955 kilometers) from Earth. Very high ocean tides can be expected from the coincidence of perigee with the full moon.
Jun. 4, 7:12 a.m. EDT – Full Strawberry Moon. Known to every Algonquin tribe, Europeans called it the Rose Moon. A partial eclipse of the moon will be visible chiefly favoring those living around the Pacific Rim. Observers in Japan and Australia for instance, can see it at, or soon after, moonrise, while those in the western United States and western Canada see it at, or just before, moonset. At maximum, about 37 percent of the moon’s diameter will be immersed in the dark umbra shadow of the Earth.
What would you name the moon for the month of your birth?
Full moon image from netlancer2006 under the Flickr Creative Commons Licence.
What does the word haggis conjure in your mind? How about jellied eels?
It’s fair to say that British food isn’t renowned for its culinary excellence. In comparison to our European neighbours, the British look pretty badly off, food-wise. But give some of our traditional dishes a chance, and you might be surprised!
BBC America has taken a look at the food behind the notorious words, and explained exactly why you should give haggis a go:
Blah blah blah “they cook it in a sheep’s stomach” blah blah “it’s just minced offal and oats” blah blah. Shut up. You have no reason to criticize how haggis is made (they don’t do the sheep’s stomach thing any more, by the way) and refuse to even try it unless you a) don’t drink milk because of where it comes from, b) don’t eat eggs because of what they are and where they come from and c) are any form of vegetarian or vegan. Yes, the recipe for haggis makes it sound gross, but you know what? It’s not. It’s lovely. It tastes like the best, pepperiest meatloaf you’ve ever eaten, and goes perfectly with some mashed potato, and mashed turnips (or swede) and lots of gravy.
What other British foods (and words) do you think are misunderstood?
If you’re a word geek, you probably already know all about the World Palindrome Championships, whose inaugural event was held a couple of weeks ago in Brooklyn.
Held as part of the larger American Crossword Tournament, the Championships featured six expert palindromists facing off against each other to see who would be crowned the best. It turned out to be Mark Saltveit, a freelance writer who had spent weeks preparing for the challenge. His winning palindrome?
“Devil Kay fixes trapeze part; sex if yak lived.”
Saltveit’s prize was $500, and after the competition he joked ”I’ll probably quit my day job and go full-time on the professional palindrome money-winning circuit.”
(Source: Oregon Live)
A fascinating article in the New York Times takes a look at Guaraní, an indigenous language of Paraguay that is spoken by an estimated 90% of the population.
We often hear of indigenous languages dying out because of lack of speakers, but Guaraní is different. It’s been supported by governments throughout history, including dictators who have used speakers as informants. Under General Stroessner, who ruled from 1954 to 1989, the language thrived – the General made it an official language and rewarded rural speakers with land for their loyalty.
It’s not just dictators who have supported the language though. When democratic rule was established in Paraguay, the language was furthered strengthened when it was made equal to Spanish. Now there is debate in the country about its future.
You can learn more about Guaraní over at Omniglot.
Students trying to learn Chinese might be surprised to read this, but one man helped simplify the language by creating Pinyin.
Pinyin is the writing system that turns Chinese characters into words using the Roman alphabet; it’s been credited with improving the literacy rate in China as well as making it easier for people across the world to learn the language.
Zhou Youguang helped invent the system, but the 106 year old Beijing resident is not well known in his home country. After the second world war he became an economics professor in Shanghai before being invited to join a project looking at simplifying the Chinese language. He initially turned down this invitation but was persuaded and spent three years developing pinyin along with colleagues.
To read more about Mr Youguang, read the full article at BBC News. What an incredible man.
Mad Men returns for its fifth season this weekend; whilst we all wait to see what Don will do next, take a look at this article from The Atlantic on the historical accuracy of the language used.
The show is lauded for its attention to period detail, particularly the costumes, but Benjamin Schmidt argues that the language used is just a tad too modern:
The clearest signs that the Mad Men writers can’t really escape the present is not the complete, howling mistake, but the steady slip; a drumbeat of language that’s just slightly too modern. There are another dozen phrases in Mad Men that are at least 100 times more common today than in the early ’60s, and the bulk of the show lies in language characteristic of today, not of the past.
What are these mistakes? Many seem relatively harmless, but betray the modern writers. When Lane Pryce tells Draper that no one asked him to “euthanize” Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce in season four, for example, his lines are clearly penned by a writer from the post-Kevorkian era. Had Pryce wanted to take the rare step of making “euthanasia” a verb, he would have been far more likely to say “euthanatize;” but most likely of all, he wouldn’t have said anything of the sort. (Source: The Atlantic)
The rest of the article (and comments) are fascinating – take a look.
