Language: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 3

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WonderLanguage

The palest ink is better than the best memory.

This line is often called an ancient Chinese proverb and sometimes credited to Confucius, but nothing links it to him. An English version was recorded around 1900 by Arthur H. Smith, an American missionary who spent more than fifty years in China, in his collection Proverbs and Common Sayings from the Chinese. A similar Chinese saying, 好记性不如烂笔头, says that a good memory is no match for a worn-out pen. Both make the same point: a quick note outlasts a memory we feel sure of today.

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WonderLanguage

Four English weekdays are named after Germanic gods: Tuesday after Tiw, Wednesday after Woden, Thursday after Thor and Friday after Frigg.

The pattern copies a Roman habit. Latin named the days after the seven heavenly bodies visible to the naked eye, which were also gods: the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn. Germanic peoples swapped each Roman god for the local god they saw as closest. Tiw (the Norse Týr), a war god, replaced Mars; Woden (Odin), linked to wisdom and travel, replaced Mercury; Thor, the thunder god, replaced Jupiter; and Frigg, a goddess of marriage and the home, replaced Venus. Saturday kept Saturn, while Sunday and Monday name the Sun and Moon. The same Roman origin shows in French: mardi, mercredi, jeudi and vendredi come from Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and Venus.

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WonderLanguage

Runes, the letters early Germanic peoples and the Vikings wrote with, are made mostly of straight strokes, which were easy to cut into wood, stone, bone and metal.

The runic alphabet is called the futhark, after the sounds of its first six letters: f, u, th, a, r, k. The oldest form, the Elder Futhark, had 24 letters and appears in inscriptions from around AD 150. In the Viking age Scandinavians cut it down to 16 letters, the Younger Futhark, so one rune often stood for several sounds. Runes have almost no horizontal strokes, probably because a cut along the grain of wood is hard to see. The word 'rune' is related to old Germanic words for a secret or mystery. Most surviving inscriptions are short: names, owners' marks, memorials on standing stones. The longest known, on Sweden's 9th-century Rök stone, runs to more than 700 runes.

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WonderTechnology

'Algorithm' comes from the Latinised name of al-Khwarizmi, a 9th-century mathematician in Baghdad; 'algebra' comes from al-jabr, a word in the title of his best-known book.

Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (c. 780–c. 850) worked around 820 at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, a library and centre of learning of the Abbasid caliphs. A Latin translation of his book on calculating with Indian numerals began 'Dixit Algorizmi' ('So said al-Khwarizmi'). From that form came 'algorism', the old word for reckoning with Hindu-Arabic numerals, and later 'algorithm', a fixed set of steps for solving a problem. His book on equations has al-jabr, 'restoration', in its title: it meant moving a subtracted term to the other side of an equation so that the equation stays balanced.

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WonderLanguage

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's 1943 novella 'The Little Prince' has been translated into about 600 languages and dialects, more than any other book except the Bible.

Saint-Exupéry, a French pilot and writer, wrote and illustrated the book in 1942 in the United States, where he lived in exile after the fall of France; much of it was written in a rented house on Long Island. It first appeared in New York in April 1943, in English and French, and reached French readers only after the Liberation, because the Vichy regime had banned his work. He never saw that: in July 1944 he disappeared on a reconnaissance flight over the Mediterranean. By 2017 it had become the world's most translated non-religious book.

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StillnessLanguage

Japanese has a single word, 'komorebi', for sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees.

Komorebi is written 木漏れ日, from the characters for 'tree', 'leak through' and 'sun', and it is an everyday word in Japanese. English can describe the same light perfectly well, but it needs a whole phrase; linguists call such a missing single word a 'lexical gap'. Other languages have famous examples of their own, such as Portuguese 'saudade', a longing for someone or something absent, and Welsh 'hiraeth', homesickness for a place or time one cannot return to. Wim Wenders's 2023 film Perfect Days brought the word to many viewers: its hero photographs light through trees, and the film ends by explaining komorebi.

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StillnessLiterature

A word after a word after a word is power.

The line ends 'Spelling', a poem in Margaret Atwood's 1981 collection True Stories. Atwood, born in 1939, is one of Canada's best-known writers and the author of The Handmaid's Tale. The poem opens with her young daughter on the floor with plastic letters, learning to spell, and plays on the old link between spelling words and casting spells. It then turns to women who were kept from writing or silenced. The closing line gathers this up: words, added one by one, are how people build and hold power.

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WonderLanguage

The English word 'nightmare' first meant not a bad dream but the 'mare', a demon believed to sit on sleepers' chests at night. It came to mean any frightening dream only in the 19th century.

In Old English a mære was a goblin or evil spirit that settled on sleepers and smothered them. It has nothing to do with mare meaning a female horse, which comes from a different Old English word; the two only sound alike. The sensation it described is now called sleep paralysis: the mind wakes during the dreaming stage of sleep while the body still cannot move, often with a feeling of weight on the chest. Many cultures have a similar figure. In Turkish folklore it is the karabasan, a dark presence said to press down on sleepers. Only from around 1829 did 'nightmare' come to mean any bad dream.

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WonderLanguage

Modern Icelandic has kept so much of Old Norse, the language of the Viking Age, that Icelanders today can read the medieval sagas, usually in editions with modernised spelling.

Norse-speaking settlers reached Iceland from about 870, and the sagas, prose stories about the first settlers, their families and their feuds, were mostly written down in the 13th century. Icelandic changed less than its Scandinavian relatives, partly because the island was remote and partly by choice: instead of borrowing foreign words, Icelanders coin new ones from old roots. The word for computer, tölva, blends tala, 'number', with völva, 'prophetess'. The grammar has stayed close too, with nouns still changing their endings for four cases, as in Old Norse. The point is continuity rather than effortless reading: readers still lean on notes and modern spelling.

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WonderLanguage

A palindrome is a word or phrase that reads the same forwards and backwards, like 'level' or 'never odd or even'.

The English word was introduced by the writer Henry Peacham in 1638, from the Greek palin, 'back' or 'again', and dromos, 'running' or 'course'. Palindromes are far older: the Latin Sator square, a block of five words that reads the same in several directions, was scratched on a wall at Pompeii before AD 79. Many languages have a favourite; Turkish has 'Ey Edip Adana'da pide ye', 'Hey Edip, eat pide in Adana'. Two whole palindromic novels have been published in English, and mathematicians study palindromic numbers such as 121 and 12321.

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WonderLanguage

The word 'yogurt' comes from Turkish. English borrowed it from Ottoman Turkish in the early 1600s, and the gh in 'yoghurt' is an old way of spelling the Turkish ğ sound.

Turkish yoğurt is usually traced to an old root meaning to thicken or condense, from the same family as the verb yoğurmak, 'to knead'. Turkic peoples of Central Asia were eating it long before the word reached Europe: in the 11th century, Mahmud of Kashgar's dictionary of the Turkic languages and Yusuf Has Hajib's poem Kutadgu Bilig both mention it. English first recorded the word in 1625, from travellers' accounts of the Ottoman lands. Yogurt became an everyday food in Western Europe only in the 20th century; in 1919 Isaac Carasso began making it commercially in Barcelona under the name Danone. Today most European languages use the Turkish word, with small changes of spelling.

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WonderLanguage

Yakamoz is the Turkish word for the glitter that appears in dark seawater when fish, oars or waves stir it. The light comes from tiny marine organisms that glow when disturbed.

The word came into Turkish from Greek, and the Turkish Language Association's dictionary gives it two meanings: the glitter made in the sea by moving fish or oars, and the drifting sea creature that gives off light when something touches it. That creature is most often Noctiluca scintillans, a single-celled plankton known in English as sea sparkle. One alone is invisible, but millions together make a boat's wake shine. Light made by a living thing is called bioluminescence. Many people use yakamoz for moonlight shimmering on the water, yet the real thing is easiest to see on dark, moonless nights, because moonlight and city lights drown it out.

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StillnessLanguage

The Turkish word gönül is usually translated as 'heart', but it also covers affection, desire, goodwill and remembrance: much of a person's inner life of feeling.

Gönül goes back to Old Turkic köŋül, which already meant heart, mind and inner feeling. Its reach shows in everyday Turkish: gönül almak means to soothe someone's hurt feelings, gönül kırmak to hurt them, and gönülden to do something wholeheartedly. A volunteer is a gönüllü, literally 'one with gönül', someone who acts from the heart rather than from duty. A well-known saying, gönül ferman dinlemez, means 'the heart obeys no decree': feelings do not take orders. When Turkish poems and songs are translated, gönül is usually rendered simply as 'heart', and much of its meaning is lost on the way.

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WonderLanguage

In Turkish, yurt means homeland or a place to live, such as a student dormitory. English took the same word, through Russian, for the round felt tent of Central Asian nomads.

Old Turkic yurt meant a dwelling, a camping ground or a people's home range: the land where a family pitched its tents and grazed its herds. Modern Turkish kept the sense of home and homeland, as in yurt dışı, 'abroad', literally 'outside the homeland', and yurttaş, 'citizen'. Russians who met the nomads of the steppe used yurta for the tent itself, and English took yurt from Russian in the late 18th century. The Turkic peoples who still live in these tents have other names for them: Kazakhs say kiyiz üy, 'felt house', and Kyrgyz say boz üy, 'grey house'.

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WonderLanguage

Turkish ordu means 'army', and the English word 'horde' comes from the same Turkic root. It reached English in the 1550s, through Polish, as a name for the tent camps of steppe nomads.

In the older Turkic languages, ordu (Tatar urda) meant a ruler's camp or mobile court, the tent city that moved with a khan and his army. Europeans met the word through the Tatars, and Polish horda, with an added h, passed it on to other languages. The best-known example is the Golden Horde, the Mongol-led state that ruled the western steppe from the 1240s until 1502. By the 1610s English was already using horde for any unruly crowd. The same word travelled south too: Urdu, the language of Pakistan and much of northern India, takes its name from it, through a phrase meaning 'language of the camp'.

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WonderLanguage

The English word 'kiosk' comes from Turkish köşk, a garden pavilion. It arrived through French in the 1620s, and only in the 1860s did it start to mean a newsstand.

Turkish köşk itself came from Persian kushk, 'palace, pavilion'. In the Ottoman world it meant a light, often open-sided building in a palace garden, made for resting and enjoying the view. Topkapı Palace in Istanbul still has famous examples, such as the Baghdad Kiosk, built in 1639 to mark the capture of Baghdad. Western Europe copied the idea for its own gardens in the 17th century, and French turned the word into kiosque. From about 1865 English used it for small street stalls selling newspapers, later for telephone kiosks, and now for the touchscreen machines where people buy tickets or order food.

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WonderLanguage

Homer's epics rarely, if ever, call the sea blue. In the Iliad and the Odyssey it is 'wine-dark' (oinops pontos), a phrase used 17 times across the two poems.

In 1858 the British statesman William Gladstone, a keen classical scholar, pointed out that Homer's colour words rarely describe hue at all; they mostly contrast light with dark. Some readers took this to mean the ancient Greeks could not see blue, and in the 1860s the German philologist Lazarus Geiger found blue missing from many other ancient texts too. Gladstone later rejected the colour-blind reading, and modern scholars agree: the difference lies in language, not eyesight. In 1969 the linguists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay showed that languages tend to gain colour words in a common order, beginning with dark and light, then red, then green and yellow, with blue usually arriving late.

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WonderHistory

One of the oldest known customer complaints is a clay tablet from about 1750 BC in which a man named Nanni complains to the merchant Ea-nasir about poor-quality copper.

The tablet was found at Ur, a Sumerian city in what is now southern Iraq, during Leonard Woolley's excavations of 1922–34. It is written in cuneiform, the wedge-shaped script pressed into wet clay. Nanni says he paid for copper ingots that turned out to be sub-standard, that he has refused to accept them, and that his servant was treated rudely when sent to deal with the matter. The tablet normally belongs to the British Museum, but in 2025 it went on loan to the Zayed National Museum in Abu Dhabi, where it is expected to stay until 2027. Since 2015 it has been a popular internet joke, and Guinness World Records lists it as the oldest written customer complaint.

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The oldest complete printed book that carries a date is a Chinese copy of the Diamond Sutra, a Buddhist text, printed from carved wooden blocks in AD 868.

The copy is a scroll more than five metres long, made of paper panels printed from carved wooden blocks, a method called woodblock printing, and it opens with a picture of the Buddha teaching. Around the year 1000 it was sealed, with tens of thousands of other documents, in a small cave at the Mogao Caves near Dunhuang in north-western China. In 1907 the explorer Aurel Stein acquired it from the monk who had found the hidden library, and it is now in the British Library in London. A note at the end gives the date, 11 May 868, and says that a man named Wang Jie had it made, on behalf of his parents, to be given away freely.

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A Christian prayer book finished in 1229 hides lost works by Archimedes. Its maker scraped the ink from a 10th-century copy of his writings and wrote the prayers over it.

A manuscript that has been scraped and written over is called a palimpsest. This one holds the only known copy of Archimedes's Method of Mechanical Theorems, in which he found areas and volumes by imagining shapes cut into countless thin slices, an idea close to later calculus. It also holds his Stomachion puzzle and the only surviving Greek text of On Floating Bodies. The parchment was reused in 1229, probably in Jerusalem. In 1906 the Danish scholar Johan Ludvig Heiberg spotted the mathematics beneath the prayers in Istanbul. The book then vanished for decades, suffered from mould, and had forged pictures painted over some pages. Sold at auction in 1998 for $2 million, it was studied at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore from 1999 to 2008, where ultraviolet, infrared and X-ray imaging recovered much of the hidden text.

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WonderHistory

The Inca Empire kept its records on quipu, bundles of knotted cords that stored numbers such as taxes, census counts and the contents of storehouses.

A quipu is a main cord with anything from a few to thousands of cords hanging from it. On the accounting quipu, knots worked like written digits: a knot's height on the cord showed units, tens, hundreds or thousands, its type showed the number, and colours and groupings showed what was being counted. Trained record-keepers called quipucamayoc made and read them, and Spanish officials still relied on them for years after the conquest began in 1532. Knotted records are older than the Inca: the first certain examples come from the Wari Empire, around AD 600 to 1000. Several hundred quipu survive, mostly in museums. Researchers, including Gary Urton of Harvard, have gathered them into databases to test whether some also recorded names or stories.

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WonderLanguage

Nüshu, meaning 'women's writing', is a script used by women in Jiangyong county, in China's Hunan province, for letters, songs and life stories.

Nüshu grew up over several centuries among the women of Jiangyong, many of Yao heritage, at a time when few women were taught standard Chinese characters. Its slender, slanting signs developed from Chinese writing, but each of its roughly 600 to 700 characters stands for a syllable of the local speech, Xiangnan Tuhua, rather than for a word. Women used it for letters between close friends who had sworn sisterhood and for 'third-day books', cloth-bound booklets of songs given to a bride on the third day of her marriage, wishing her happiness and grieving at the parting. Scholars studied it widely from the 1980s. Yang Huanyi, thought to be the last woman who had learnt it in the traditional way, died in 2004 at 98; today the script is taught again in Jiangyong.

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WonderTechnology

Grace Hopper, a US Navy mathematician, helped move programming from raw machine code to languages written in English words, work that led to COBOL.

Hopper joined the US Navy in 1943 and was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer. In 1952, at the company that built the UNIVAC, she completed A-0, an early compiler: a program that turns instructions written by people into the machine code a computer runs. Many colleagues believed computers could only do arithmetic, but she argued that programs could be written in English words, and her team's FLOW-MATIC language did exactly that. It became a main model for COBOL, a business language created in 1959 and still used by banks and governments. She retired from the Navy in 1986 as a rear admiral, aged 79, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom after her death, in 2016.

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DriveLanguage

Braille is a writing system read with the fingertips: each letter is a pattern of raised dots within a small cell of six.

The system takes its name from Louis Braille, a blind French student who published it in 1829. Each cell has two columns of three dot positions, which gives 63 possible patterns in a space small enough to be felt with one touch of a fingertip. Besides letters, braille has contractions, short patterns for common words that make reading faster, and separate codes for mathematics, science and music. Today there are braille codes for more than 133 languages, including Turkish, which has its own signs for letters such as ç, ğ and ş. Many blind readers also use refreshable braille displays, devices whose small pins rise and fall to show text from a computer or phone. Since 2019 the United Nations has marked 4 January, Louis Braille's birthday, as World Braille Day.

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