An eclectic assortment of stuff: food, archaeology, fun, books, history, geekery, etc.
From The Telegraph: Ostrich egg patterns oldest form of art and communication.
Engraved patterns on the side of ostrich eggs dating back to the Stone Age could be the oldest form of written communication known to man, claims a new study.
The etchings, thought to be 60,000 years old, were used to mark the eggs which had [...]
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc, language on Dec 8th, 2009
From the New York Times: Boom! Hok! A Monkey Language Is Deciphered.
Krak krak! (Watch out, a leopard!)
Hok hok hok! (Hey, crowned eagle!)
Very good — you have already mastered half the basic vocabulary of the Campbell’s monkey, a fellow primate that lives in the forests of the Tai National Park in Ivory Coast. The adult males [...]
In Montana a Hassidic rabbi helps police speak Hebrew — and it’s all for the benefit of a police dog. From the New York Times:
Miky, pronounced Mikey, is in a Diaspora of his own. He was born in an animal shelter in Holland and shipped as a puppy to Israel, where he was trained by [...]
Posted in language on Aug 6th, 2009
From the Guardian: The idiotic joys of idioms.
Why do we say I’m not pulling your leg? Or he kicked the bucket? I don’t mean etymologically, I mean logically. Why do we use idioms?
I became fascinated by that question when I discovered that Russians say I’m not hanging noodles on your ears when they’re not pulling [...]
Posted in language on Mar 9th, 2009
From spiegel.de: British Savant Learns German in a Week
Is it possible to learn German in just days? Linguistic savant Daniel Tammet managed to do so in the course of a week. Using his own special technique, the 30-year-old, who has a mild form of autism, has learned to speak more than 10 languages.
Daniel Tammet likes [...]
Posted in language on Mar 2nd, 2009
From the International Herald Tribune: Experts trying to decipher ancient language.
When archaeologists on a dig in southern Portugal last year flipped over a heavy chunk of slate and saw writing not used for more than 2,500 years, they were elated.
The enigmatic pattern of inscribed symbols curled symmetrically around the upper part of the rough-edged, yellowish [...]
Posted in language on Feb 26th, 2009
From the Beeb: ‘Oldest English words’ identified.
Some of the oldest words in English have been identified, scientists say.
Reading University researchers claim "I", "we", "two" and "three" are among the most ancient, dating back tens of thousands of years.
Their computer model analyses the rate of change of words in English and the languages that share a [...]
Posted in history & archaeology, language on Dec 26th, 2008
This Babelstone post on Byrhtferth’s Ogham Enigma is fascinating, detailed, and includes great images.
It probably comes as a surprise to most people to find out that the earliest extant manuscript to include any text written in the Ogham script is an early 12th century English manuscript copy of a work by the late Anglo-Saxon monk [...]
Posted in language on Dec 19th, 2008
From World Wide Words: absquatulate.
ABSQUATULATE
To make off, decamp, or abscond.
The 1830s — a period of great vigour and expansiveness in the US — was also a decade of inventiveness in language, featuring a fashion for word play, obscure abbreviations, fanciful coinages, and puns. Only a few inventions of that period have survived to our times, [...]
Posted in history & archaeology, language on Dec 17th, 2008
From Reuters: Sudan statue find gives clues to ancient language.
Archaeologists said on Tuesday they had discovered three ancient statues in Sudan with inscriptions that could bring them closer to deciphering one of Africa’s oldest languages.
The stone rams, representing the god Amun, were carved during the Meroe empire, a period of kingly rule that lasted from [...]
Posted in history & archaeology, language on Nov 1st, 2008
From the Beeb: ‘Oldest Hebrew script’ is found.
Five lines of ancient script on a shard of pottery could be the oldest example of Hebrew writing ever discovered, an archaeologist in Israel says.
The shard was found by a teenage volunteer during a dig about 20km (12 miles) south-west of Jerusalem.
Experts at Hebrew University said dating showed [...]
Posted in language on Oct 31st, 2008
From BBC Wales: E-mail error ends up on road sign.
When officials asked for the Welsh translation of a road sign, they thought the reply was what they needed.
Unfortunately, the e-mail response to Swansea council said in Welsh: "I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated".
So that was [...]
From csmonitor.com: Québecois: maligned accent may have its roots in royal courts.
Québec’s francophones have long been ridiculed by the Parisian French – the scholars, elites, and aesthetes from the ancestral homeland. They have deemed the Québecois accent an "abomination" of what they consider the most beautiful language.
They shouldn’t sneer.
The Québeckers’ much-maligned accent can be traced [...]
I bet Anna Garforth has more fun making graffiti than anybody else; certainly she has more impressive results. For her Mossenger project (Mossenger part one, Mossenger part two) Anna made letters out of moss, then affixed them to a brick wall. She sprays the text with water to keep it alive.
Erasmuspc.com includes Anna’s explanation:
Being [...]
From The Telegraph: Italians vote for ugliest English words.
For years it was the French who worked themselves into a lather over their native tongue being infected by English.
Now it is their southern neighbours across the Alps who are wringing their hands at the growing incursion of Anglo-Saxon words and phrases into every day use.
From ‘il [...]
Posted in books & lit, language, privacy on Aug 29th, 2008
From the BBC: The secret code of diaries.
The 300,000-word journal of Charles Wesley, the co-founder of the Methodist movement, which was written in an obscure shorthand, has been solved and the diary transcribed. It has taken nine years.
It appears that the shorthand was used not for speed, but for security. What was so important that [...]
Posted in language, technology on Aug 26th, 2008
From the University of Washington: ‘Can you see me now?’ Sign language over cell phones comes to United States.
A group at the University of Washington has developed software that for the first time enables deaf and hard-of-hearing Americans to use sign language over a mobile phone. UW engineers got the phones working together this spring, [...]
Posted in language on Aug 6th, 2008
Now first there’s the common words quiz. How many of the most common words in the English language can you list within five minutes? Go on now, we’ll wait here. I’ll even hold your beer for you.
Once you’re done with that, move on to the random sentence structure filler, which is more fun. The site [...]
Posted in history & archaeology, language on May 14th, 2008
This must be the most fascinating thing on the web today: A Throng of Fifty Warriors Routed by a Single Scholar: An Exercise in Ogham Decipherment.
The discovery of an Ogham stone during an episode of the cult British archaeology programme, Time Team, is something that I have been longing to blog about ever since I [...]
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc, language on May 1st, 2008
From discovery.com: Young Birds Babble Like Babies.
The happy babbling that entertains parents as their babies try to mimic speech turns out to have a parallel in the animal world.
Baby birds babble away before mastering their adult song, researchers report in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.
Michale S. Fee and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of [...]
From Reuters: School fights to revive native Canadian language.
In a grey, shed-like building on the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve in southern Ontario, Esenogwas Jacobs is getting her kindergarten students ready to head home for the day.
"Gao dehswe," Jacobs says, calling her students to the door.
"Gyahde:dih," she adds, it’s time to go.
Her students [...]
Posted in language on Feb 14th, 2008
Oh my! A Hieroglyphic Luwian Valentine, a Hurrian-Hittite Dialog, a Sumerian Valentine… who can resist? Go see the results of the The First (and Possibly Last) Eisenbrauns Ancient Near Eastern Valentine Contest.
Posted in history & archaeology, language on Nov 10th, 2007
From the New York Times: Humdinger of a Project: Tracing Slang to Ireland.
Growing up Irish in Queens and on Long Island, Daniel Cassidy was nicknamed Glom.
"I used to ask my mother, ‘Why Glom?’ and she’d say, ‘Because you’re always grabbing, always taking things,’" he said, imitating his mother’s accent and limited patience, shaped by a [...]
Posted in language on Oct 3rd, 2007
From the Jerusalem Post: The Jews invent vowels.
"Roughly 3,000 years ago, in and around the area we now call Israel, a group of people who may have called themselves ivri, and whom we call variously ‘Hebrews,’ ‘Israelites,’ or more colloquially but less accurately ‘Jews,’ began an experiment in writing that would change the world."
That’s how [...]
Posted in language on Sep 16th, 2007
From The Telegraph: The rise of Indian English.
It has taken decades of struggle, but more than half a century after the British departed from India, standard English has finally followed.
Young and educated Indians regard the desire to speak English as it is spoken in England as a silly hang-up from a bygone era. Homegrown idiosyncrasies [...]