Beware quick translations. The transcript of Putin's remarks in Alaska have him talking about "the agreement that we’ve reached together" but he used the word ponimanie, which better translates as the much vaguer "understandings"...

I spent Christmas thinking about Greco-Bactrian kings and Greek texts in Nubia, and now you can too! If you'd welcome some distraction from Armageddon, here's my January mega-post, all about the Greek language's life beyond Europe. open.substack.com/pub/dannylbate…

When William the Conqueror rode into England in 1066, he didn’t just bring knights and taxes. He brought a new ruling language. Overnight, the people at the top of society stopped speaking like the people at the bottom. In royal courts, great halls, and law courts, the new

🚨 Another fraud scheme happening in Minnesota, when Somalis go to the doctor and don’t speak English they have to hire a translator who is hired by the county for $100 an hour for a minimum of 8 hours. The fraud is deep in Minnesota, the mayor of Minneapolis said LIVE on

This is straight out of Succession: Larry Ellison named a giant yacht "Izanami" after a Shinto deity, but quickly renamed it after it was pointed out that the name spelled "I'm a Nazi" backwards!!!

Xiaoma, a polyglot, was invited to give a speech at a high school for Language Week, and he delivered the entire speech in Gen Alpha slang.

Who knew the word karaoke had roots in Ancient Greek? Via Starkey Comics.

Which words are known better by women than men, and which by men than women? I’ve removed the key showing which color represents which sex, because I’m pretty sure you won’t be needing it… [Link below.]

my favorite linguistic quirk in any language has to be the m-reduplication in turkish, which consists of repeating a word with an m-prefix to mean "and other things like this". so e.g. "kitap" is book but "kitap mitap" is "books and some other book-like things"

"Dwanzdah," meaning twelve, is one of the oldest historically attested words of Kurmanji Kurdish or the Balochi language. It was minted on the coins of the final Sassanian King Yazdegerd III (632 to 651 AD) in the province of Kerman, in southern Iran, using a pronunciation that

In lists of things, we often see A tiny curve, a little key. It sits between the final two And gives a pause, a breath, a clue. Without its presence, we might find A sentence jumbled, undefined. But when it’s there, we can be sure Each item's clear, each phrase secure. So let

Okay this is so cool because Yorùbá language does this too. But instead of the m-prefix, we use ‘k’. Examples: •àrùn k’aàrùn - any type of sickness •ìgbà k’iìgbà - any time •òun k’òun - any thing The original word means something different on its own, but adding that

Part of an important linguistic phenomenon: We memorize units at every level of the linguistic hierarchy, from morphemes (where we have no choice, because they are completely arbitrary), to irregular conjugations & declensions, to two-word collocations like these, to idioms, to

Loan words/phrases most ppl dont know about: Cantonese- Ketchup, Typhoon, Tea, Brainwash, Gung-ho, “Long time no see”, “No can do” Sanskrit- Avatar, Jungle, Loot, Juggernaut Hindi- Bungalow, Shampoo Japanese- Tycoon, Futon Arabic- Admiral, Candy, Ghoul, Algorithm Persian-

🔵 Today is the World Greek Language Day! We must not forget that Greek is one of the oldest living languages, having an uninterrupted continuity of 4500 years, and that it played a decisive role in the cultural and intellectual development of the Western world.