1/3) A Roman brick from Cherchell, Algeria with a perfect 2,000-year-old imprint of a human hand...

'Pacific Ocean' has three Cs and each one is pronounced differently.

The first three syllables of cooperation don't sound like cooper.

The middle Gs in finger, ginger and singer all sound different.

English only seems like a normal language because you're used to it.

Fun fact! The chemical element gadolinium (Gd, 64) also comes from the Semitic root G-D-L: 'big, strong, grown', but to understand exactly how that happened, I had to delve into Finnish genealogical records!

As well as the noun Zeit 'time', German has the adjective zeitig, once meaning 'timely' but nowadays 'early'.

The two have English cognates that have drifted further apart in their meaning: 'tide' and 'tidy'.

fascinating episode of 'A Language I Love' podcast - describing the mutually unintelligible variants of a small language I begin to see how language replacement takes place

Mačiatko? To je káva?

S britským velvyslancem na Slovensku Nigel Baker jsme zkoušeli, jak dobře známe 🇨🇿 a 🇸🇰 slova (moc dobře ne) UK in Slovakia

The days when broad Suffolk required subtitles. I have - just once or twice - heard Suffolk accents even thicker than these, which I couldn’t actually understand at all

Wittgenstein's birthday today. Near the end of his life he asked to see a Dominican friar, and had several conversations with Fr Conrad Pepler OP. He expressed a desire to him - never fulfilled - to retire to a Dominican priory, so long as no one spoke to him about philosophy.

Honestly if this is not a perfect cover for a history of Czechoslovakia in the 60s then I don’t know …

Linguist on 'language grief', the feeling shared by many members of minorities who never got the opportunity to acquire their heritage language. Many of them are now reclaiming their languages. hf.uio.no/iln/english/re…

More important than the other news.

Thinking about this Ethan Hawke interview