Deciphering a secret society manual
Around 1730 a German secret society recorded their initiation rituals in an encrypted manuscript. In 2011, that cipher was finally decoded.
Category: Language
Donald Duck’s voice
Donald Duck’s distinctive speaking style is a type of alaryngeal speech – it is made without using your voice box.
Polari slang
Naff, butch, camp, and zhoosh are slang terms that came out of Polari, an argot from early 20th century English gay subculture.
Word history duels
Was the word “orange” first applied to the colour or the fruit? Was “Turkey” first a bird or a country? Was “duck” first an action or an animal? “Organ” the instrument or “organ” the body part?
The linguistics of speaking in tongues
Glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, occurs sometimes in Pentecostal and Charismatic Christian gatherings. It is supposed to be the language of God – but what does it say?
Multilingual tautologies
What do the River Avon, the Gobi Desert, and the La Brea Tar Pits have in common? Redundancy.
Quantum crossword
Most crosswords have a single correct solution. A quantum crossword has several.
Book of lonely vowels
Christian Bök’s 2001 anthology Eunoia contains five chapters that each use just one of the five vowels.
The doubters and the oracle bones
The Doubting Antiquity School were sceptics of ancient Chinese texts’ historical veracity… until the oracle bones were deciphered.
Burmese names
Burmese people do not have surnames.
Meaningful sounds (Part 2)
Why do monolingual Japanese speakers have difficulty distinguishing “l” and “r” sounds? And why do monolingual English speakers have difficulty distinguishing “t” and “th” sounds? [2 of 2]
Meaningful sounds (Part 1)
In English, what we think of as the letter “t” is actually a collection of many different sounds – but most of the time we do not notice the difference. [1 of 2]
Most consonants, fewest vowels
Ubykh, an extinct language spoken on the shores of the Black Sea, has more consonants and fewer vowels than almost any other language.
Losing letters
The 2001 novel Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn depicts a town in which a totalitarian government begins banning letters – from the town and from the novel itself.
Reconstructed ancestor language
Proto-Indo-European is thought to be the ancestor language of English, Latin, Greek, French, Russian, Urdu, Sanskrit, Farsi, and dozens of others. But what did it sound like?
Chinese rhyme
We know how Chinese was pronounced 1400 years ago thanks to the world’s oldest surviving rhyming dictionary.