History

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English: Across the Pond.

by Christian Sammut February 28, 2013 Case Studies

When you consider the differences between the United States and Britain, it’s not hard to conclude that they are, ultimately, much the same. While there is 3,000 or so miles separating these tiny Isles in Northern Europe from the vast continent of the North Americas physically, it’s merely a drop in the ocean in most [...]

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Burns Night Celebrates Scots Language

by Alison Kroulek January 25, 2013 Celebration
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Happy birthday, Robert Burns! The “”national poet of Scotland” was born 254 years ago today, on 25 January 1759. During his lifetime, Burns earned widespread and lasting acclaim for his poetry, much of which was written in the Scots language or in the Scottish dialect of English. His best-known works include “To a Mouse,” “A [...]

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Ancient Mayan Prophecies Don’t Translate Well

by Alison Kroulek December 20, 2012 History
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It’s December 20th. Tomorrow, according to an ancient Mayan prophecy, is Armageddon. Are you having an end-of-the-world party tonight? Well, don’t do anything you’re going to regret too much the next morning. As it turns out, ancient Mayan prophecies don’t translate all that well. The ancient Maya never predicted that the world would end today, [...]

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What Killed The Sumerian Language?

by Alison Kroulek December 7, 2012 History

It’s a puzzle that’s long vexed archaeologists, historians and linguists alike. What caused the decline the of the ancient Sumerian civilization and the language they spoke? The ancient Sumerians were the first civilization to invent a system of writing. Cuneiform tablets that describe their laws, myths and stories still survive today. For centuries, the Sumerian [...]

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Is English a Scandinavian Language?

by Alison Kroulek December 6, 2012 History
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A linguistics professor at the University of Oslo has been making headlines with a controversial claim. He believes that English is, in fact, a Scandinavian language, placing it in the North Germanic language family rather the West Germanic family, where it has traditionally been placed. The professor, Jan Terje Faarlund, explained his hypothesis in an [...]

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Crowdsourcing an Ancient Script

by Alison Kroulek October 23, 2012 History
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Proto-Elamite was a writing system used 5,000 years ago by the proto-Elamite people, the oldest known civilization in Iran. Although it was written in clay tablets like cuneiform and probably inspired by the proto-Elamites’ Mesopotamian neighbors, the proto-Elamite script is quite different in appearance, consisting mainly of lines and circles. These differences, along with the [...]

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Anatolia: The Birthplace of Indo-European Language?

by Alison Kroulek August 28, 2012 History
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The Indo-European language family is one of the world’s largest, encompassing languages as diverse as English and Hindi. Linguists have managed to reconstruct quite a bit of Proto-Indo-European , but the origins of the language family remain shrouded in mystery. Who spoke it, and how did it spread across two continents, and eventually the world? [...]

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The Evolution of English

by Alison Kroulek July 26, 2012 History
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All languages change over time, and English is no exception. Now, a physicist at the University of Maribor in Slovenia has used a computer program to analyze the text of 5.2 million books published since 1520, to find out how language use has changed over the centuries. The results lead to a couple of interesting [...]

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DNA May Support Linguist’s Controversial Hypothesis

by Alison Kroulek July 15, 2012 History
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New DNA evidence seems to offer support for a controversial hypothesis about the origins of Native American languages put forward by linguist Joseph Greenberg in his 1987 book Language in the Americas. Greenberg hypothesized that all Native American languages could be grouped into three language families: Amerind, Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dené, correlating with three separate migrations [...]

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Ancient Roman Curses, Translated

by Alison Kroulek May 26, 2012 History
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What do you do when you come home from a bad day at work, furious at someone? Do you pour yourself a drink? Blow off steam playing video games? If you lived in a time when people commonly believed in black magic, you might have used a different coping mechanism: casting a curse at the [...]

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