Language: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 4

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WonderTechnology

A hyperlink lets one document open into another, turning web reading into a network of chosen paths.

In 1945 the American engineer Vannevar Bush imagined a desk-sized machine he called the Memex, which would let a reader join pages of microfilm into personal 'trails', long before computers could do anything like it. Ted Nelson, who read Bush's essay, is credited with coining the term 'link' in the mid-1960s at the start of his Project Xanadu, and in 1968 Douglas Engelbart's team showed working links between pieces of text on a real computer in a famous live demonstration. Tim Berners-Lee, working at the CERN physics laboratory near Geneva, joined the idea to the internet: he proposed the World Wide Web in 1989, and in 1991 pages written in his HTML language began linking to one another, so a decades-old idea became something anyone with a browser could click.

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StillnessLanguage

Code-switching is the movement between languages, dialects or registers as people read audience, place, safety and belonging.

The term first appeared in print in 1953, in work by the linguist Roman Jakobson and colleagues, who credited the idea to William Freeman Twaddell. For years many scholars treated mixing languages as a sign that a speaker had not fully mastered either. Research since the 1980s has reversed that view. In a 1980 study of Puerto Rican bilinguals in New York, the linguist Shana Poplack found that switches follow grammatical rules, and that the speakers most fluent in both languages were the ones who switched most often inside a single sentence. Other researchers showed that people switch for social reasons: to signal closeness or authority, to make a joke, to quote someone, or simply because a word fits better in the other language.

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WonderTechnology

Unicode is the shared standard that gives every letter, symbol and emoji its own fixed number, so text written on one device reads the same on another.

Before Unicode, computers used hundreds of separate encodings, so the same number could stand for different letters on different systems, and text in another language often turned into strings of nonsense symbols. In 1987 Joe Becker of Xerox and Lee Collins and Mark Davis of Apple began planning a single universal character set. The Unicode Consortium was incorporated in California in January 1991, and the first volume of the standard appeared that October. Unicode 2.0, in 1996, broke the original 16-bit limit and made room for over a million code points, as the numbers are called, so that historic scripts such as Egyptian hieroglyphs could be added. Today it covers more than 170,000 characters in 175 scripts, though each one still needs a font that can draw it.

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WonderLanguage

Morse code spells each letter as a pattern of short and long signals, so a message can travel as clicks, tones, flashes of light or electrical pulses. From the 1840s it let the electric telegraph carry messages over long distances.

Samuel Morse's first telegraph code, around 1837, used only numbers, which stood for words in a codebook. His collaborator Alfred Vail expanded it in 1840 to letters, giving the most common letters the shortest signals; he judged which were most common by counting the metal type in a local newspaper's print shop. In 1848 the German telegraph pioneer Friedrich Gerke simplified the code, and his version became the basis of the International Morse code agreed in Paris in 1865. Ships sent distress calls, including the famous SOS, in Morse until satellite-based systems replaced it in 1999, but radio amateurs still use it and navigation beacons still identify themselves in Morse.

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WonderLiterature

French writer Georges Perec's novel La Disparition (1969) never uses the letter e, and that was deliberate. It came out of Oulipo, a group of writers and mathematicians founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, who set themselves writing rules like this one.

A text written without a chosen letter is called a lipogram. In French, e is the most common letter, found in articles, verb endings and countless everyday words, so leaving it out forces constant rewording rather than one clever trick. The title means 'The Disappearance', and the plot turns on something missing. Oulipo stands for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, 'workshop of potential literature': its members used mathematical and linguistic rules to push writing where habit would not take it. Gilbert Adair's English translation, A Void (1994), also avoids e. Other translators dropped the letter hardest to avoid in their own language: the Spanish version has no a, the Russian no о.

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StillnessArt

The Book of Kells, a Latin copy of the four Gospels made around AD 800, turns its text into pages of dense, coloured ornament painted with carefully prepared inks and pigments.

It was made by monks of the community founded by St Columba, probably begun on the island of Iona off Scotland and continued at Kells in Ireland after Viking raids drove the monks there. Its 340 surviving leaves, 680 pages, were given to Trinity College Dublin in 1661. Since 1953 they have been bound in four volumes; one is always on display, and the open page changes every 12 weeks. Studies of the colours found red and yellow ochre, a green copper pigment, woad for blue and a lichen dye for purple. Lapis lazuli, once assumed, was not used, and neither was gold; the woad and lichen point to an origin in what is now Scotland.

Medieval manuscripts (Book of Kells)Read card

WonderHistory

Two green-skinned children who spoke an unknown language were found near the village of Woolpit in Suffolk in the 12th century, according to two medieval English chroniclers. At first they would eat nothing but raw broad beans.

The story comes from William of Newburgh and Ralph of Coggeshall, who wrote it down some decades after the event, which probably took place in the reign of King Stephen (1135–1154). Villagers found a brother and sister beside one of the wolf pits that gave Woolpit its name. Over time the children learned to eat other food and lost their green colour, but the boy was sickly and died around the time of his baptism. The girl learned English, said they came from a twilight land she called St Martin's Land, and later married a man from King's Lynn. One modern explanation is that they were lost children of Flemish immigrants, tinted green by chlorosis, a form of anaemia caused by poor diet; nobody can now prove it.

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WonderLanguage

In 1952 Michael Ventris, a British architect working in his spare time, deciphered Linear B, the Bronze Age script of Crete and mainland Greece that had defeated scholars for half a century. He built on earlier work by the American scholar Alice Kober.

Arthur Evans had found thousands of Linear B clay tablets at Knossos on Crete from 1900 onwards. Ventris first saw them at an exhibition in London in 1936, aged 14, and heard Evans speak. Kober had shown that words in the script changed their endings, as words do in Latin or Greek, and Ventris arranged the signs in grids to work out their sounds. Most experts assumed the language was not Greek, but his results showed it was an early form of Greek. He announced this in a BBC radio talk on 1 July 1952; John Chadwick, a Cambridge classicist and wartime code-breaker, heard it and joined him. The tablets proved to be palace records of sheep, oil, spices and chariot wheels. Ventris died in a car crash in 1956, aged 34.

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DriveLanguage

Ikigai is a Japanese word that joins iki, 'life', with kai, 'worth' or 'benefit'. It names whatever makes life feel worth living, and for many people in Japan that is something everyday rather than a grand purpose: a garden, grandchildren, a daily walk.

The psychiatrist Mieko Kamiya wrote the best-known study of the idea, Ikigai ni Tsuite (On the Meaning of Life), published in 1966. Much of it grew out of her years working with leprosy patients at the Nagashima Aiseien sanatorium, people cut off from society who still found reasons to live. Japanese researchers have since linked a sense of ikigai with better health in later life. The popular four-circle diagram joining what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs and what you can be paid for is a later Western addition: in 2014 the writer Marc Winn put the word ikigai at the centre of an existing purpose diagram by Andrés Zuzunaga.

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WonderLanguage

Villagers in Kuşköy, in the mountains of Giresun on Turkey's Black Sea coast, speak a whistled form of Turkish that carries for kilometres across the valleys. UNESCO added it to its list of heritage in need of urgent safeguarding in 2017.

Kuşköy lies in the Çanakçı district of Giresun province. Kuş dili, 'bird language', is not a separate tongue but Turkish itself, with vowels and consonants turned into rising and falling whistles loud enough to cross terrain that would take an hour to walk. Almost anything can be said: news, invitations, warnings. A 2015 study by the biopsychologist Onur Güntürkün found that while ordinary speech is processed mainly in the brain's left hemisphere, listeners used both hemispheres more evenly for whistled Turkish. Since mobile phones arrived, fewer young people have learned it and most fluent whistlers are now older, which is why UNESCO listed it as in need of urgent safeguarding.

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DriveLanguage

Sisu is the Finnish word for the reserve you reach after your resolve has already gone: not courage before the ordeal, but the stubbornness that turns up once it should have ended.

Finns describe sisu as something closer to a deep-seated grit than to bravery or perseverance, and specifically as what remains when normal capacity is spent. The word is old, and it became a national self-description during the Winter War of 1939–40, when a small Finnish army held out far longer than anyone expected against a Soviet invasion. The researcher Emilia Lahti has studied sisu as a psychological construct at Aalto University, distinguishing a healthy form, extraordinary action under pressure, from a harmful one that pushes past a limit that should have been respected.

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StillnessLanguage

Saudade is the presence of an absence: longing for a person, a place or a time that may be gone, far away, or may never have existed at all. Portuguese speakers often call it untranslatable.

It is not quite nostalgia, which looks backwards, nor melancholy, which has no object. Saudade points at something specific and holds the ache and the sweetness together: the pleasure of remembering is part of the feeling, not a consolation for it. The word is closely associated with Portugal's centuries of sea voyages and the people left waiting on shore, and it is a central theme of fado, Lisbon's traditional song. In Brazil, 30 January is marked as the Day of Saudade.

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StillnessLanguage

Mono no aware is a Japanese phrase for the gentle ache you feel at something beautiful precisely because it will not last: cherry blossom, a child's early years, a good evening ending. It is not grief but a quiet awareness that everything passes.

Literally 'the pathos of things'. The scholar Motoori Norinaga made it central to Japanese literary criticism in the eighteenth century, arguing that sensitivity to the passing of things, not moral teaching, was the true subject of The Tale of Genji, the eleventh-century novel by Murasaki Shikibu. It helps explain why cherry blossom, whose full bloom lasts only about a week, became one of Japan's most loved symbols: the brevity is the point. Each spring crowds gather under the trees for hanami, flower-viewing picnics, knowing the petals will soon fall. The feeling is not exactly sad. It is noticing that a moment is already passing while you are still inside it.

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StillnessLanguage

Hiraeth is a Welsh word for longing towards a home that is gone, changed, or perhaps never quite existed: homesickness with nowhere to go back to.

It carries grief, yearning and a kind of loyalty at once, and it is bound up with the history of the Welsh language itself, a tongue that survived centuries of pressure and has recovered ground more recently through revival efforts and official status. Speakers often use it about a landscape rather than a house. Related words exist elsewhere: Portuguese saudade, Galician morriña, German Sehnsucht, Romanian dor. That so many languages built a separate word for this suggests it names a common human feeling.

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WonderLanguage

Speakers of Guugu Yimithirr, an Aboriginal language of Queensland, Australia, describe space by compass direction rather than left and right: the cup is north of you, an ant is on your south-east leg.

The linguist John Haviland documented this in the 1970s and 1980s, and Stephen Levinson later tested it, challenging the assumption that body-centred words like left and right are universal. In experiments, speakers could point to distant places with striking accuracy, as if keeping a constant mental note of which way they faced, a habit that starts in childhood. Similar systems exist in Tzeltal, a Mayan language of Mexico, and in Balinese. The language also gave English a famous word: in 1770 James Cook's crew recorded 'kangaroo' from Guugu Yimithirr speakers near today's Cooktown. Researchers often cite the case as evidence that the language you speak can shape everyday habits of thought, though how far that goes is still debated.

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WonderLanguage

Nicaraguan Sign Language was created by deaf children themselves. When Nicaragua opened its first schools for the deaf around 1980, pupils arrived with only home-made signs; within a few years they had built a shared language, with grammar no adult had taught them.

Before the schools, most deaf Nicaraguans lived isolated at home, using simple gestures invented with their families. Lessons focused on lip-reading and Spanish, but the children began signing to one another in the playground and on the school buses. The first pupils built a rough shared code, a kind of pidgin, meaning a simple contact language. Younger children who joined later made it more regular, adding consistent grammar their older schoolmates had not used, and each new intake made it more systematic. Linguists including Judy Kegl (later Shepard-Kegl) and Ann Senghas documented this as it happened, a rare recorded case of a language being born. It suggests children actively build grammar rather than simply absorbing a finished one.

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StillnessLanguage

Tsundoku is the Japanese word for buying books and letting them pile up unread. It carries no real reproach: it joins 'piling things up' and 'reading', and the pile is treated as a fairly harmless habit.

The word first appeared in print in the 1870s, in a mild joke about a teacher whose library grew faster than his reading. It plays on 'tsunde oku', to stack up and leave for later, blended with 'dokusho', reading. That makes it different from bibliomania, an older Western term for a compulsive, even pathological urge to collect books: tsundoku describes an ordinary, slightly sheepish habit, not a disorder. The word spread well beyond Japan in the 2010s, when English-language writers began using it as a wry, forgiving label for the habit of buying more books than anyone could realistically read.

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DriveLanguage

Louis Braille, blind since a childhood accident, created at fifteen the six-dot raised alphabet that blind people still read today. He took an existing system of up to twelve dots per character and cut it down to six, small enough for one fingertip to feel at once.

Braille injured an eye with a tool in his father's harness workshop at the age of three; infection spread and he was fully blind by five. At the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris he met the raised-dot system of Charles Barbier, a former army officer. It is often retold as a military code for reading orders in the dark, but Barbier's own 1815 book describes no military purpose. Its tall twelve-dot cells could not be felt with one touch; Braille's six-dot cell could, which made reading by hand fluent. His own school refused to adopt the system in his lifetime, preferring embossed Roman letters that were hard to read and impossible to write, so pupils learned it in secret. It was adopted in 1854, two years after he died of tuberculosis at 43.

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DriveLanguage

Sequoyah, a Cherokee silversmith who could not read or write any language, spent about twelve years creating a set of symbols for the syllables of Cherokee. Within a few years of its completion in 1821, much of the Cherokee Nation could read and write.

According to accounts of his life, he was mocked for years; some neighbours thought he was practising witchcraft, and one story says his early work was burned. He first tried a separate symbol for every word, then realised the language could be broken into syllables and settled on about 85 characters, a syllabary rather than an alphabet. To prove it worked, he had his young daughter read aloud a message she could not have known in advance. It spread remarkably fast: by 1828 the Cherokee were printing a bilingual newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix. He is one of very few people known to have created a complete writing system without first being able to read one.

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DriveLanguage

Hangul, the Korean alphabet, was created in 1443 under King Sejong so that ordinary people could read and write. Until then Koreans wrote in literary Chinese, which took years to master; Hangul's small, systematic set of letters could be learned far more quickly.

The script was announced to the public in 1446 in a document called the Hunminjeongeum, meaning ‘the correct sounds for the instruction of the people’. Its accompanying explanation says a clever person could learn the letters in a morning. The consonant shapes are drawn from the position of the tongue, lips or throat when making each sound, an unusually deliberate piece of design for its time, and letters are grouped into square syllable blocks. Some court scholars protested that giving up Chinese characters would be a step towards barbarism, and for centuries the elite kept writing in Chinese. Hangul spread instead through letters, popular literature and everyday writing, and today it is used for virtually all Korean text.

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DriveLanguage

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda was one of the leading figures in reviving Hebrew as an everyday spoken language. From the 1880s in Ottoman Palestine, he promoted it at home, in his newspapers, in schools and in a large dictionary, as new Hebrew-speaking communities formed.

Hebrew had continued for centuries in prayer, scholarship and writing, but for a long time it was nobody's everyday mother tongue. Ben-Yehuda, who settled in Jerusalem in 1881, insisted that his household speak only Hebrew, and his son Itamar is often described as the first native speaker of modern Hebrew. He spent decades compiling a large dictionary of ancient and modern Hebrew, coining many new words for modern life along the way. The revival itself, though, was a collective effort by teachers, writers, immigrants and new schools in Ottoman and later British-ruled Palestine, not the work of one household alone.

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DriveLanguage

Wôpanâak, the language of the Wampanoag people of Massachusetts, stopped being spoken in the nineteenth century. From the 1990s Jessie Little Doe Baird, a Mashpee Wampanoag, rebuilt it from old written records, and her daughter grew up as its first native speaker in more than a century.

Baird says it began with dreams in which people spoke to her in words she could not understand; later she recognised them as Wôpanâak. In 1993 she co-founded the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project, and at MIT, working with the linguist Kenneth Hale, she earned a master's degree in linguistics in 2000. Her sources were unusually rich: a 1663 translation of the Bible, the first Bible printed in the Americas, and many letters, deeds and wills that Wampanoag people wrote in their own language in the 1600s and 1700s. Related Algonquian languages helped with grammar and pronunciation. The dictionary she began has more than 10,000 entries, and in 2010 she received a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called genius grant. A small immersion school now teaches young children in the language in Mashpee.

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DriveLanguage

By the 1970s few Māori children were growing up speaking Māori. The response, from 1982, was the kōhanga reo or 'language nest': preschools where elders looked after the youngest children and spoke nothing but Māori to them all day.

Kōhanga reo means 'language nest' in Māori. The first opened at Pukeatua in Wainuiomata, near Wellington, in 1982; by 1994 more than 800 were caring for about 14,500 children. The idea was that a language survives not as a school subject but as the ordinary language of daily life, at the age when children pick it up without effort. Fluent speakers were mostly elderly and few, and placing them with toddlers put them where they mattered most. The model inspired Hawaii's Pūnana Leo preschools from 1984, and later language nests for Sámi in Finland and for several Indigenous languages in Canada.

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StillnessLanguage

Gezellig is a common Dutch adjective for things that feel pleasant, convivial or cosy: a room, café, evening, conversation or gathering can all be gezellig.

Gezellig comes from gezel, an old Dutch word for a companion, so at heart it is about good company rather than comfort alone. A room can be gezellig, but so can a person, an evening with friends or a busy café. The opposite, ongezellig, is a common, mild complaint about a stiff party, a cold, bare room or someone who leaves early. Dictionaries reach for 'cosy', 'convivial' or 'nice atmosphere', because no single English word covers it all. Danish hygge, which became fashionable abroad in the 2010s, is a close cousin, as is German Gemütlichkeit.

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