Language: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 5

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StillnessLanguage

Sobremesa is the Spanish word for the time spent lingering and talking at the table after a meal, once the food is finished. In Spain it can last longer than the meal itself.

The word joins sobre (over, upon) and mesa (table): time spent 'over the table' once the plates are cleared. In Spain lunch is traditionally the main meal of the day, and a sobremesa of coffee, perhaps a small liqueur and conversation can stretch well into the afternoon, especially at weekends and family gatherings. The habit even shaped television: the after-lunch slot, known as la sobremesa, is one of Spanish TV's busiest viewing times. The same pairing of words names a desktop computer, an ordenador de sobremesa, one that sits on the table. English can describe the habit but has no single everyday word for it.

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DriveLanguage

Modern Greek meraki describes doing something with care, attention, enthusiasm or personal involvement, especially cooking or craft. The word comes from Turkish merak, whose meanings include curiosity and keen interest.

Greek borrowed the word from Ottoman Turkish merak, which Turkish had itself taken from Arabic. In Ottoman usage merak covered desire, passion and fondness as well as worry and curiosity; modern Turkish uses it mostly for curiosity, keen interest and worry, and a meraklı is an enthusiast. In Greek the word went another way: meraki came to mean the care and love someone puts into a task, and in some uses it still means longing. A dish cooked me meráki, 'with meraki', is one made with real attention. English lists of 'untranslatable words' gloss it as 'putting your soul into something', a poetic reading rather than a dictionary definition.

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StillnessLanguage

Yūgen is a Japanese aesthetic idea of subtle, mysterious depth: a beauty felt through what is hinted at rather than fully shown or stated.

The word, written 幽玄, comes from Chinese philosophical texts, where it meant dim, deep or mysterious. Japanese poetry critics took it up in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries for verse that only hints at its full meaning; the poet Fujiwara no Teika counted it among the ten proper styles of poetry. Around 1400 Zeami, who with his father shaped Noh theatre, made yūgen the highest aim of performance. Images traditionally linked to his idea include watching the sun sink behind a flower-covered hill and following wild geese until they vanish into the clouds: the feeling lies in what is left unseen.

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WonderLanguage

On La Gomera in the Canary Islands, people can whistle Spanish: Silbo Gomero turns speech into whistles that carry up to five kilometres across the island's deep ravines, much farther than a shout.

Silbo Gomero is not a separate language but a way of whistling Spanish: the whistler turns the sounds of speech into a few vowel and consonant whistles that rise and fall in pitch, sometimes with a finger in the mouth. It descends from a whistled speech used by the island's pre-Spanish inhabitants, the Guanches, and was adapted to Spanish after the conquest in the 1400s. It was vital for shepherds and farmers on an island where a neighbour visible across a ravine might be an hour's walk away. Use fell sharply from the 1950s, as people left the island and telephones arrived. The Canary Islands made it a compulsory school subject in 1999, and UNESCO added it to its list of intangible cultural heritage in 2009.

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WonderLanguage

In 1999 Shigetaka Kurita, part of the team behind NTT DoCoMo's i-mode mobile internet service in Japan, drew 176 emoji, each on a grid of just 12 by 12 pixels. It is the best-known early emoji set, and New York's Museum of Modern Art added it to its collection in 2016.

i-mode, launched in February 1999, let people in Japan send email and open simple web pages on their phones, but the screens were tiny and messages were short. Kurita wanted small symbols that could carry information such as the weather, a mood or a place in a single character, and his set covered weather, transport, hearts, faces and everyday objects. He is often called the father of emoji, but his set was not the first: in 1997 a phone from the rival carrier J-Phone already offered 90 small symbols, though it sold poorly. Emoji spread worldwide from 2010, when Unicode, the international standard that gives every character a fixed code so it appears on any device, added them.

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StillnessLanguage

Toki Pona is a language invented by the Canadian linguist Sonja Lang and first shared online in 2001, and it gets by with only about 120 to 140 core words. Speakers build everything else by combining them: a friend, for example, is a 'good person'.

Lang created Toki Pona partly to simplify her own thinking during a hard period in her life, drawing on Taoist ideas of simplicity. The name means 'good language' or 'simple language'. Most words carry several related meanings: 'moku' covers food, eating and drinking. The word count varies because Lang's 2014 book, Toki Pona: The Language of Good, listed about 120 words, and a 2021 dictionary based on how speakers actually use the language added more. Toki Pona has a small but lively community online, and in 2022 it received its own code, 'tok', in the international ISO list of languages.

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WonderLanguage

The Armenian alphabet was created around 405 CE by Mesrop Mashtots, a monk and scholar, so that the Bible and church services could be written in Armenian rather than in Greek or Syriac. It is still in use today.

Mashtots worked with Sahak, head of the Armenian Church, and had the support of King Vramshapuh. Most of what we know comes from a biography written in the 5th century by his pupil Koriun. The first texts in the new script were translations of the Bible, and a wave of translation and original writing followed, which Armenians still call the golden age of their literature. The original alphabet had 36 letters. Two more, for sounds in words borrowed from other languages, were added in the Middle Ages, and a 20th-century spelling reform counted the ligature և, two letters joined into one sign, as a letter of its own. The script carried Armenian identity through centuries of rule by larger empires.

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WonderLanguage

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) gives each speech sound its own symbol. Since 1888 it has let linguists write down how words in any language are actually pronounced, whatever their spelling.

The alphabet comes from the International Phonetic Association, founded in Paris in 1886 by French and British language teachers led by Paul Passy, who wanted one notation that would work for any language. Most symbols are Latin letters, with extra letters and small marks added for sounds that Latin has no letter for, such as the clicks of some southern African languages. Dictionaries use it because spelling is an unreliable guide: English 'read' is said two ways, and the IPA writes them differently, /riːd/ and /rɛd/. The Association still revises its chart when phoneticians agree on changes.

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WonderLanguage

Morse code gives the shortest signals to the letters used most: E, the commonest letter in English, is a single dot and T a single dash, while a rare letter such as Q takes four signals. That made everyday messages quicker to send by telegraph.

Alfred Vail, Samuel Morse's partner, is usually credited with fitting the code to letter frequency. He estimated how often each letter is used by counting the metal type in the cases of a newspaper printer in Morristown, New Jersey, reasoning that printers keep most of the letters they need most. The American version had dashes of different lengths and gaps inside some letters. In 1848 Friedrich Gerke simplified it in Germany, and his version, made an international standard in 1865, is the Morse code still used. Long before anyone spoke of data compression, the code already followed its main idea: spend the fewest signals on what people say most. Radio amateurs still learn it for pleasure.

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DriveProverbs

Drop by drop, a lake is formed.

This Turkish proverb is very old: a form of it, tama tama köl bolur, appears in the Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk, the dictionary of Turkic languages that Mahmud al-Kashgari compiled in the 1070s. It means that small amounts, patiently added up, become something large, and it is said about saving money, learning or any slow, steady effort. English says 'many a little makes a mickle', and French 'little by little, the bird builds its nest'.

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StillnessProverbs

He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata: what is the most important thing in the world? It is people, it is people, it is people.

This whakataukī, or Māori proverb, from New Zealand is often spoken at gatherings, in schools and in speeches. It is traditionally credited to Meri Ngaroto, a 17th-century woman of the Te Aupōuri tribe in the far north, as the end of a longer saying that asks where the bellbird would sing if the heart of the flax plant were torn out. Repeating 'he tangata' three times is a Māori way of speaking for emphasis.

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WonderMigration

Over several thousand years, Bantu-speaking farming peoples spread from the highlands between today's Cameroon and Nigeria across most of central, eastern and southern Africa. Hundreds of related Bantu languages, including Swahili, Zulu, Shona and Kikuyu, are spoken there today.

Historians once pictured a single great 'Bantu migration'. Linguistic, archaeological and genetic evidence now points to a slower spread along many routes, roughly between 4000 BC and AD 500, with Bantu speakers reaching what is now South Africa by about AD 300. The German linguist Wilhelm Bleek coined the name Bantu in 1862 from the word for 'people' shared by many of these languages. Farming, herding and iron-working spread in different mixes from region to region, and everywhere the newcomers mixed with the people already living there. The click sounds of Zulu and Xhosa, for example, were borrowed from the Khoisan languages spoken earlier in southern Africa.

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WonderMigration

Starting from Taiwan more than 4,000 years ago, seafarers speaking languages of the Austronesian family settled the islands of South-East Asia and much of the Pacific, as far as Hawaii, New Zealand and Easter Island, and to the west reached Madagascar.

Most linguists, archaeologists and geneticists agree that the expansion started in Taiwan and reached the Philippines by around 2000 BC, though the newcomers mixed extensively with people already living in the islands. Sailing outrigger canoes, boats steadied by a float on one side, they carried taro, yams, pigs, dogs and chickens. From about 3,300 years ago a distinctive stamped pottery called Lapita marks their spread into the western Pacific. Navigating by stars, ocean swells and birds, Polynesian voyagers later reached Hawaii, Easter Island and finally New Zealand, around AD 1250 to 1300. About 1,500 years ago others crossed the Indian Ocean to Madagascar, which is why Malagasy is most closely related to a language of Borneo.

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StillnessMusic

Fado is a Lisbon song tradition that took shape in the early nineteenth century in the city's old working-class districts near the port, such as Alfama, Mouraria and Bairro Alto. Its name probably comes from the Latin fatum, fate. A solo singer is usually accompanied by a classical guitar and the twelve-string Portuguese guitar.

It was first sung among sailors, dock workers and the poor of the port districts. UNESCO describes fado as a blend of Afro-Brazilian sung dances, local song and dance, rural traditions brought to Lisbon by migrants, and the city songs of the early nineteenth century. Its lyrics range over love, loss, fate and everyday city life. Saudade, a hard-to-translate longing for someone, somewhere or some time that is gone, runs through much of it, though not every song. Fado is still sung in concert halls, small fado houses and neighbourhood associations, and joined UNESCO's list of humanity's intangible heritage in 2011.

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DriveDesign

Isotype is a way of showing social and economic data with rows of small repeated pictures, so that people can understand it across languages and levels of schooling. It was developed in 1920s Vienna by Otto Neurath, Marie Reidemeister (later Marie Neurath) and the graphic artist Gerd Arntz.

Isotype stands for International System of Typographic Picture Education. Otto Neurath developed it in 1920s Vienna at the Social and Economic Museum, aiming to let ordinary readers, including people with little schooling, compare social and economic data at a glance. Its central rule was to never resize a single icon to show a bigger quantity; instead, a larger number was shown by repeating the same small icon more times, so a reader could count as well as compare. After Austria's political turmoil forced Neurath to flee in 1934, he continued the project first in the Netherlands and later in England. The approach's descendants are visible today in transport maps, road signs and the small repeated icons used in modern infographics.

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WonderArchaeology

The Vindolanda tablets are thin sheets of wood written on in ink around AD 100 at a Roman fort in northern England. Their letters, lists and army records show everyday life on the empire's frontier.

The first tablets turned up in March 1973, when the archaeologist Robin Birley, alerted by a student excavator, Keith Liddell, noticed that what looked like wood shavings had writing inside: two stuck-together pieces peeled apart to reveal ink. More than 1,700 have now been found, preserved in damp, oxygen-poor ground. Most are slightly older than Hadrian's Wall, which was begun nearby in AD 122. They include a cavalry officer's polite request for more beer for his men, a note about underpants sent to a soldier, and a birthday invitation from Claudia Severa to her friend Sulpicia Lepidina. A scribe wrote most of it, but Severa added the closing greeting herself, one of the earliest known examples of writing in Latin by a woman. Most of the tablets are held at the British Museum.

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WonderArchaeology

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are some half a million scraps of ancient writing dug out of an Egyptian town's rubbish dumps. Lost plays and poems lie among contracts, tax returns, private letters and school exercises.

Two young Oxford scholars, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, began digging the ancient rubbish mounds of Oxyrhynchus, a town about 160 kilometres south of Cairo, in 1896. Egypt's dry climate had kept papyrus, the paper-like writing material made from a reed, from rotting. Among tax returns, receipts and letters they found fragments of Sappho's poems, comedies by Menander that had been lost for centuries, and early Christian texts. The haul was so large that only a small share has been published so far, because each scrap has to be cleaned, pieced together, read and translated. The Egypt Exploration Society, which keeps most of the collection in Oxford, is still publishing new volumes.

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WonderTechnology

The Linotype was a typesetting machine that cast whole lines of text in molten metal as an operator typed at a keyboard. Invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler and first used by the New York Tribune in 1886, it set newspapers for nearly a century.

Before the Linotype, compositors picked individual metal letters from a case by hand and set them one by one, so assembling a newspaper page took hours. Mergenthaler, a German-born watchmaker's apprentice who emigrated to the United States and worked in Baltimore, built a machine in which each keystroke released a small brass mould of a letter. When a line was complete, the machine filled the row of moulds with molten metal, producing a solid bar called a slug, then returned the moulds to their places for reuse. The name comes from “line o' type”. The keys were arranged by how often letters are used, so an operator who botched a line ran a finger down the first columns, producing “etaoin shrdlu”, which sometimes slipped into print by mistake. Phototypesetting replaced it in the 1970s.

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WonderTechnology

In the 1790s Claude Chappe built a chain of towers across France whose movable wooden arms signalled coded messages. Operators watched the neighbouring tower through a telescope and copied each signal, so one symbol could cross the 230 kilometres between Paris and Lille in about nine minutes.

Chappe worked on the system with his brothers, and in 1792 the revolutionary government asked him to build the first line, between Paris and Lille. In 1794 it brought news that French troops had taken the town of Condé-sur-l'Escaut from the Austrians to Paris less than an hour after it happened. A beam and two smaller arms on top of each tower could form many different positions, standing for letters, numbers or entries in a codebook, and the operators copied them without knowing what they meant. The word “telegraph”, Greek for “far writer”, was coined for the system by the French statesman Miot de Mélito. At its height the network had 556 stations covering about 4,800 kilometres. Darkness and fog stopped it, and in 1846 France decided to replace it with the electric telegraph.

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DriveTrade

A bill of exchange was a written order telling someone in another city to pay a set sum, often in another currency. Developed by Italian merchants in the Middle Ages, it let them trade across Europe without carrying heavy coins that were easy to steal.

A merchant in Florence, for example, could pay a local banker, who wrote a bill ordering his partner in Bruges to pay the merchant's agent there in local money. Only paper travelled. The instrument took on its main features in Italy between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, building on earlier ideas: Tang China used “flying money” in the eighth century, and merchants in the Islamic world used a similar note called the suftaja. Later, in France, endorsement became common: the holder could sign the bill over to someone else, so one bill might settle several debts before it was finally paid. Bills of exchange financed European trade for centuries, and today's cheque is a form of bill of exchange drawn on a bank.

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DriveLanguage

N'Ko is an alphabet created in 1949 by the Guinean scholar Solomana Kanté for the Manding languages of West Africa. Written from right to left, it has its own letters and marks for tone, so these languages need not be squeezed into the Latin or Arabic script.

In Manding languages such as Bambara, Maninka and Dyula, the pitch of a syllable can change the meaning of a word, and neither the Latin nor the Arabic script shows it well. Kanté is said to have set to work after reading a claim that Africans had no writing of their own. He named the script N'Ko, which means 'I say' in all the Manding languages, and spent the rest of his life writing and translating in it, from the Qur'an to histories and medical texts. It spread through informal classes in Guinea, Mali and Côte d'Ivoire, and since Unicode added N'Ko in 2006 it can be typed on phones and computers.

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WonderLanguage

The Vai syllabary is a script for the Vai language of Liberia in which each sign stands for a whole syllable. It was created in the early 1830s, largely by Mọmọlu Duwalu Bukẹlẹ, and is still in use today.

Vai is spoken in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Bukẹlẹ said the signs had come to him in a dream, and the script, of about two hundred syllable signs, spread from person to person rather than through schools, used for letters, accounts and records. In the 1970s the psychologists Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole studied Vai readers to test whether literacy alone changes the way people think. In The Psychology of Literacy (1981) they reported that reading and writing Vai sharpened particular skills tied to how the script was used, while the broader effects often credited to literacy were linked more to formal schooling.

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DriveLanguage

Neo-Tifinagh is a modern alphabet for the Amazigh (Berber) languages of North Africa, developed from the ancient Tifinagh letters. Today it is used in schools, on public signs and online.

The Amazigh peoples, often called Berbers, are the indigenous peoples of North Africa. Their script descends from an ancient alphabet known as Libyco-Berber, found on rock carvings and inscriptions more than two thousand years old, and the Tuareg of the Sahara kept a form of it, Tifinagh, in everyday use. From the late 1960s, activists, notably the Berber Academy in Paris, adapted these letters into Neo-Tifinagh. In 2003 Morocco's Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture adopted it for teaching Tamazight in schools, and the language became official in Morocco's constitution in 2011. Unicode added Tifinagh in 2005, so it can be typed on computers and phones.

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WonderLanguage

Rongorongo is a script of glyphs carved into wood on Rapa Nui (Easter Island). More than twenty inscribed objects survive, but no proposed decipherment has won scholarly acceptance, and the texts remain unread.

The glyphs show human, animal, plant and geometric shapes. They are written in reverse boustrophedon: the reader follows one line from left to right, then turns the tablet upside down to read the next. Outsiders first reported the tablets in 1864, soon after Peruvian slave raids and a smallpox epidemic had killed much of the island's population, apparently including those who could read them. No bilingual text has been found to serve as a key. The surviving pieces are kept in museums and collections off the island, from the Santiago Staff in Chile's capital to tablets in Rome and Washington, and claims of a solution have so far failed to convince specialists.

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