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?
Category: Language
Chinese rhyme
We know how Chinese was pronounced 1400 years ago thanks to the world’s oldest surviving rhyming dictionary.
Memory culture
Through sophisticated mnemonics and error-checking mechanisms the Vedas, the canonical religious texts of Hinduism, have been transmitted orally for three and a half thousand years with shocking precision in both word and sound.
American gibberish
What does an American accent sound like to an Italian? The Italian song Prisencolinensinainciusol will show you.
Crossed letters
Lewis Carroll’s ninth rule of letter writing was to never cross your letters. But many people did it anyway.
Click languages
Clicks are used in several languages of southern and eastern Africa, most famously in Xhosa. The sounds make Xhosa songs and tongue twisters sound amazing.
Telegraph code
T CODE CD CNDNS LG MSGS TO SV MON WN SDG TM BI CBL.
Peace on Earth
The biblical phrase “peace on Earth, and goodwill to all men” is probably a mistake, a mistranslation because of a single missing letter.
Word frequency laws
In 1945 the linguist George Zipf observed two strange word frequency phenomena: the longer a word is, the less common it is; and the most common word is used twice as much as the second most common, three times more than the third.
Knockout mice
How do you work out the function of a specific gene? Knock them out one by one and see what happens.
There be dragons
The phrase “Here Be Dragons” actually appears only once on a historical map, on the early 16th century Hunt-Lenox Globe. And actual dragons live there.
Redividing words
The word helicopter doesn’t come from heli- and -copter; it was actually formed from helico- and -pter. That hasn’t stopped us making new words from the wrong history.
All Greek to me
The longest word in Ancient Greek literature comes from Aristophanes’ comic play Assemblywomen. It is 78 syllables long.
Hidden rules of sounds
In English no words begin with the consonant cluster /kstr/, but it does appear in the middle of “extra.” In contrast, Slovak can begin a word with “žblnkn” and Hawaiian never begins a word with more than one consonant. Why?
Dog whistles and stochastic terrorism
How do politicians court the violent fringe? Dog whistles and scripted violence.
Blackbirding
In 1862, between a third and half of the entire population of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) were kidnapped by Peruvian slavers.
The Generalist Academy 