You might be surprised to learn that a “hoosier” isn’t necessarily from Indiana. Around the St. Louis, Missouri, area, the term hoosier has a whole other meaning. And: Scotland is the home of the Golden Spurtle world championship, but what exactly...
The now-extinct Tocharian languages were spoken in western China in the latter half of the first millennium CE. We have only fragments of written texts in these languages, but here’s part of a Tocharian love poem that conveys emotions that...
Science journalist Laura Spinney’s new book Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global (Bookshop|Amazon) shows how lots of languages as diverse as Hindi, Italian, and English all stem from a single prehistoric ancestral tongue. A basic word for the...
monoprogeny n.— «Three of my closest friends are also only children and, now in our mid-30s, we have been supporting and feuding with each other in a proto-sibling way since meeting at university. We realised this a few years ago, when a...