Language: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 6

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StillnessLanguage

Vedic chanting is the recitation from memory of the Vedas, Hinduism's oldest scriptures, in Sanskrit. For some three thousand years chanters have kept the exact words, pitch accents and pronunciation by also reciting the words in set patterns that make any slip easy to spot.

The oldest of the four Vedas, the Rigveda, was composed roughly between 1500 and 1000 BC and was passed on by memory for many centuries before anyone wrote it down; pupils still learn it by ear from a teacher. Besides reciting a text straight through, chanters learn it in fixed rearrangements called pathas. In a simple one, the words are chanted in overlapping pairs (1-2, 2-3, 3-4); in the most complex, ghana, they run forwards and backwards in long interlocking loops. Because every version must match the others, a slip in one shows up at once. UNESCO proclaimed the tradition of Vedic chanting a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2003.

Vedic chantRead card

WonderLanguage

Palm-leaf manuscripts were the books of South and Southeast Asia for centuries. Scribes wrote or scratched texts onto long, narrow strips of dried palm leaf, then strung the leaves together between wooden covers.

The leaves came mainly from two palms, the talipot and the palmyra, and were dried, boiled or smoked and polished before use. In South India and Sri Lanka, scribes scratched the letters in with a metal stylus, then rubbed the leaf with soot mixed with oil so the black filled the grooves; further north, writing in ink was more common. A cord through one or two holes kept the leaves in order. Sri Lankan tradition holds that the Buddhist Pali Canon was first written down on palm leaves in the first century BC. In the humid tropics a manuscript lasted a few centuries at most, so texts survived only because they were copied again and again.

Palm-leaf manuscriptRead card

DriveLanguage

Hawaiian, ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, came close to disappearing in the twentieth century. Families revived it by opening Hawaiian-language preschools in 1984 and winning Hawaiian-medium classes in public schools in 1987, a path that now runs from early childhood to university.

In 1896, three years after the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, a law made English the language of instruction in schools, and speaking Hawaiian in class was soon discouraged, sometimes punished. By the early 1980s, by the organisers' estimate, fewer than fifty children could speak it. Parents and teachers founded the Pūnana Leo ('nest of voices') preschools, where only Hawaiian is spoken, then campaigned for classes in state schools where children learn every subject, from mathematics to science, in Hawaiian. The University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo has run a doctoral programme in Hawaiian and Indigenous language and culture revitalisation since 2006, the first of its kind.

Hawaiian languageRead card

StillnessLanguage

Ainu, the language of the indigenous Ainu people of northern Japan, is critically endangered, with very few native speakers left. Community classes, teacher training, family programmes and museum courses are now creating new places where it is spoken.

The Ainu live mainly on Hokkaido and once also lived on Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, now part of Russia. After Japan formally took over Hokkaido in 1869, assimilation policies and discrimination pushed families to raise their children in Japanese. Ainu has no known relatives among the world's languages. From 1983 the Ainu activist Shigeru Kayano ran Ainu classes in his village of Nibutani, and in 1994 he became the first Ainu member of Japan's parliament, where he spoke in Ainu. Parliament recognised the Ainu as an indigenous people in 2008, a 2019 law promoted their culture, and the national Ainu museum, Upopoy, opened in 2020.

Ainu languageRead card

DriveLanguage

Kaurna, the Aboriginal language of the Adelaide Plains in South Australia, lost its last known native speaker in 1929. Since 1989, Kaurna people and linguists have been reviving it from community memory and nineteenth-century records, and it is now taught and used in public life.

In 1840 two German Lutheran missionaries, Christian Teichelmann and Clamor Schürmann, published a record of Kaurna with about 3,000 words, a short grammar and hundreds of sentences; they ran a school at Piltawodli in Adelaide. As colonisation broke up Kaurna life, the language fell out of daily use, and Ivaritji, its last known native speaker, died in 1929. From 1989 Kaurna elders and the linguist Rob Amery used the missionaries' records to rebuild pronunciation and coin words for modern life. In 2002 the elders Lewis Yerloburka O'Brien and Alitya Wallara Rigney founded, with Amery, Kaurna Warra Pintyanthi ('creating Kaurna language'). Every park in Adelaide's city parklands now has a Kaurna name, and Whitmore Square also bears the name Iparrityi, after that last speaker.

Kaurna languageRead card

StillnessArt

Arabic calligraphy is the art of beautiful writing in the Arabic script. Because the letters join from right to left, calligraphers can stretch, compress and stack them, controlling every line with a pen cut from reed, called a qalam.

Arabic has 28 letters, and most change shape depending on whether they stand alone or join the letters beside them, which gives the calligrapher great freedom. In the tenth century Ibn Muqla, a vizier in Baghdad, set rules of proportion using the diamond-shaped dot made by the pen's tip as a unit of measure, and six classic styles grew from them, among them the monumental thuluth and the clear naskh used for books. Training is long: students copy a master's models stroke by stroke until they receive a licence, the ijaza, to sign their own work, a tradition that was especially strong in Ottoman Istanbul. Calligraphers cut their own reed pens and often use soot-based ink. In 2021 UNESCO listed Arabic calligraphy as Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Arabic calligraphyRead card

StillnessLanguage

The English word 'noon' once meant about three in the afternoon. It comes from the Latin 'nona hora', the ninth hour of daylight, when monks stopped to pray; between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries its meaning slid back to midday.

Before mechanical clocks, monasteries divided the day by the canonical hours, set times of prayer announced by bells; the ninth hour, called nones, fell in mid-afternoon. Why the word moved earlier is not certain. On fast days the fast ended at nones, which may have encouraged people to bring it forward; the usual time of the midday meal may also have shifted. Medieval hours were also elastic: each was a twelfth of the daylight, so they stretched in summer and shrank in winter. The change was complete by the fourteenth century, and Dutch 'noen' made the same move. The prayer service of nones is still said in some monasteries in mid-afternoon.

Word historyRead card

StillnessLanguage

The Japanese saying ichi-go ichi-e, roughly 'one time, one meeting', comes from the tea ceremony: every gathering is unique and can never be repeated exactly, even when the same people meet again.

The idea goes back to the sixteenth-century tea master Sen no Rikyū. His student Yamanoue Sōji wrote that guests should treat their host as if the meeting could happen only once in a lifetime. In 1858 Ii Naosuke, a tea master who was also the shogun's chief minister, fixed the four-character phrase in a book on tea, noting that even the same host and guests could never recreate a past gathering. Today it is used far beyond the tea room, as a reminder to value each encounter.

Ichi-go ichi-eRead card

StillnessCulture

Inemuri, often translated as 'sleeping while present', is the Japanese custom of dozing in a meeting or other social or work setting while still counting as part of it. It is not simply any sleep in public: the sleeper is expected to stay ready to rejoin the situation.

The word is written 居眠り, from 'i', to be present, and 'nemuri', sleep. Brigitte Steger, a Cambridge scholar of Japanese society who has written widely about sleep in Japan, describes it as governed by unwritten rules. The higher someone's status, the more acceptable it is: a senior manager or a member of parliament nodding off in a long session can even be read as a sign of dedication, of someone who has worked to exhaustion, while a junior employee has far less licence. The sleeper should keep a proper posture and stay socially 'present', ready to respond if addressed. It is common on crowded commuter trains, but it is a tolerated custom, not an official workplace virtue.

InemuriRead card

WonderHistory

The Behistun Inscription, carved high on a cliff in western Iran around 520 BCE for the Persian king Darius I, gives the same text in three languages. In the nineteenth century, scholars including Henry Rawlinson used it to decipher cuneiform, the ancient wedge-shaped script.

Cuneiform, made of wedge-shaped marks pressed into clay or cut into stone, was used across the ancient Near East for some 3,000 years to write many different languages, and by the 1700s nobody could read it. The Behistun text, about 15 metres high and 25 wide, sits some 100 metres up a limestone cliff and tells, in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian, how Darius took the throne. Groundwork came from copies of Old Persian inscriptions published by the Danish traveller Carsten Niebuhr in 1778, which Georg Friedrich Grotefend used in 1802 to identify the first signs. Rawlinson climbed the cliff from 1835 to copy the text and sent a full copy of the Old Persian to Europe in 1847. The decipherment was a shared effort over decades.

Behistun InscriptionRead card

WonderLanguage

Serendipity, the knack of finding good things by chance, is a word the English writer Horace Walpole coined in a 1754 letter. He took it from a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes kept discovering, 'by accidents and sagacity', things they were not looking for.

Walpole, son of the prime minister Robert Walpole and later author of the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, used the word on 28 January 1754 in a letter to his friend Horace Mann, the British envoy in Florence. He had just found something he needed, by chance, in an old book. Serendip is an old name for Sri Lanka, and the tale reached Europe through an Italian version of 1557 based on the Persian poet Amir Khusrau. The word stayed rare until the 20th century. Today it describes discoveries that need both luck and a sharp eye, as when Alexander Fleming noticed in 1928 that a mould had killed the bacteria on a culture plate, the observation that led to penicillin.

Horace Walpole, 1754Read card

StillnessLiterature

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

Toni Morrison gave her Nobel lecture in Stockholm on 7 December 1993, as the first Black woman to win the literature prize. These four sentences come from the heart of the speech, which is built on a fable: young people ask a wise, blind old woman whether the bird in their hands is alive or dead, hoping to catch her out. She answers that she cannot know, only that it is in their hands. Morrison reads the bird as language, kept alive or killed by how we use it. Here she sets death, our one certainty, against what we make while we live.

Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture (1993)Read card

StillnessArt

Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognises before it can speak.

John Berger was an English art critic, novelist and painter. These are the first two sentences of Ways of Seeing, a book that grew out of his four half-hour BBC television programmes of 1972, made deliberately without reverence for the art world. In the first programme he cut into a reproduction of a Botticelli painting with a scalpel on camera, to show how a detail changes meaning once it is separated from the whole. His point in this opening is simple and hard to argue with: the eye gets there first, and everything we are later told about a picture arrives to explain something we have already seen.

John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972)Read card

WonderReligion & Belief

The English word 'assassin' comes from hashishi, a medieval Arabic insult for the Nizari Ismailis, a Shia Muslim group known for killing political enemies. No surviving source shows that their agents actually took hashish before their missions.

Hashishi literally meant 'hashish user', but as an insult it meant something closer to 'riff-raff'. Its earliest known use is in a polemic issued around 1122 by the Fatimid caliph al-Amir in Cairo, whose own Ismaili branch had split from the Nizaris; Sunni writers used similar terms. Crusaders in Syria picked the word up, and by the fourteenth century Italian assassino meant a hired killer. In 1809 the French scholar Silvestre de Sacy traced the word to hashish and assumed the drug had been used, which helped fix the story in popular belief.

EtymologyRead card

WonderLanguage

Jacob Grimm, famous for the fairy tales he collected with his brother Wilhelm, showed in 1822 that consonants in the Germanic languages, such as English and German, had changed in regular patterns. That is why Latin 'pater' matches English 'father'; the rule is known as Grimm's Law.

Grimm's Law describes a set of sound shifts that took place in prehistoric times, before the Germanic languages split apart. Where Latin, Greek and Sanskrit kept an older p, t or k, Germanic turned it into f, th or h: compare Latin pater, tres and cornu with English father, three and horn. The Danish scholar Rasmus Rask had noticed many of these correspondences in 1818; Grimm set them out as a system in the second edition of his Deutsche Grammatik. It showed that sound change follows rules, which became a founding idea of historical linguistics.

Jacob Grimm / historical linguisticsRead card

WonderLanguage

The Phoenician alphabet, 22 letters that wrote only consonants, is the ancestor of most alphabets used today. Greeks adapted it around the 8th century BC and added vowels, leading to Latin and Cyrillic; Aramaic scribes adapted it separately, leading to Hebrew and Arabic.

The Phoenicians were traders from cities such as Tyre and Byblos on the coast of today's Lebanon, and their alphabet travelled with them around the Mediterranean. Greek writers reused signs for sounds Greek did not need as vowels: aleph, 'ox', became alpha. The Latin alphabet reached Rome through the Etruscans, who had borrowed it from Greek settlers in Italy. Cyrillic was created in the late ninth century by followers of the missionaries Cyril and Methodius, mostly from Greek letters. Aramaic, the everyday language of the Persian Empire, carried its version east: it became the square Hebrew script and, through the Nabataean script, Arabic. Even the word 'alphabet' comes from alpha and beta.

Historical writing-system developmentRead card

WonderLanguage

On 2 February 1786 the British judge Sir William Jones told the Asiatic Society in Calcutta that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin were too alike in verb roots and grammar for chance, and must share a common source that perhaps no longer existed. His talk is often seen as the start of comparative linguistics.

Jones was a judge on the Supreme Court in Calcutta, then the centre of British rule in India. He learned Sanskrit so that he would not have to depend on the pandits, the Hindu legal scholars who advised the court, and in 1784 he founded the Asiatic Society to study Asia's languages and history. His famous sentence says no scholar could examine the three languages 'without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.' Others, such as the French Jesuit Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux in 1767, had noticed the link before him. The name 'Indo-European' came later, in 1813, from the English scholar Thomas Young.

Sir William Jones, address to the Asiatic Society (1786)Read card

WonderLanguage

More than 2,000 years ago, the Indian grammarian Pāṇini described Sanskrit in nearly 4,000 short rules. His grammar, the Aṣṭādhyāyī ('Eight Chapters'), orders them so precisely, with symbols and rules about rules, that linguists compare it with modern formal grammars and programming languages.

Pāṇini probably lived around the fourth century BC in Gandhara, in what is now north-western Pakistan; tradition names his birthplace as Shalatura. His Aṣṭādhyāyī has 3,959 rules, each so terse that it was learned by heart together with a commentary. The rules build words from roots and endings step by step, and short markers let a single rule cover whole groups of sounds. For more than two thousand years it has been the standard account of correct Sanskrit. In 1967 the computer scientist Peter Ingerman suggested renaming Backus–Naur form, a notation used to define programming languages, 'Pāṇini–Backus form', because Pāṇini had used a comparable method.

Pāṇini, AṣṭādhyāyīRead card

WonderLanguage

A new sign language has arisen within about three generations in Al-Sayyid, a Bedouin village in Israel's Negev desert where inherited deafness is unusually common. It developed a consistent grammar of its own, and many hearing villagers sign it as well as deaf ones.

Al-Sayyid was founded in the mid-nineteenth century, and a recessive gene for deafness spread through marriages within the community. Four deaf siblings were born about 75 years after its founding; today some 120 to 150 of roughly 3,000 residents are deaf. In 2005 the linguists Wendy Sandler, Irit Meir, Carol Padden and Mark Aronoff reported that second-generation signers already used a fixed word order, subject-object-verb, unlike the Arabic and Hebrew spoken around them. The third generation signs faster and in longer sentences, so linguists can watch a language build its grammar in real time.

Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language researchRead card

WonderLanguage

In Aymara, a language of the Andes, the word for the past, nayra, also means 'eye' and 'front', and speakers point ahead of themselves for the past and behind them for the future: the reverse of most languages studied.

The Aymara live around Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, Peru and Chile. In 2006 the cognitive scientists Rafael Núñez and Eve Sweetser analysed hours of video-recorded interviews and found that speakers' hand gestures matched their words: they pointed forward when talking about the past and back over the shoulder for the future. The pattern was strongest among older people who spoke little Spanish. The usual explanation is that Aymara ties time to sight: what is known has been seen and lies in front of you, while the unknown future is out of sight, behind you.

Rafael Núñez & Eve Sweetser, Cognitive Science (2006)Read card

WonderLanguage

Russian has two basic words for blue: goluboy for light blue and siniy for dark blue. In a 2007 experiment, Russian speakers told two blues apart faster when the shades had different names, and the advantage vanished when their verbal memory was kept busy.

The study, led by Jonathan Winawer and published in PNAS, showed volunteers three blue squares and asked which of the lower two matched the top one. Russian speakers were faster when the two blues fell on opposite sides of the goluboy/siniy line; English speakers, who call both 'blue', showed no such effect. When the Russians silently rehearsed a string of digits, which ties up verbal memory, the advantage disappeared, but a spatial memory task left it intact. This supports a modest form of linguistic relativity, the idea that language can influence thought: words can speed up a judgement, but they do not change what the eyes can see.

Winawer et al., PNAS (2007)Read card

WonderLanguage

Most languages' words for tea come from Chinese, in one of two forms. 'Te', from the coast of Fujian, reached most of Western Europe by sea with Dutch traders and gave English 'tea'; 'cha' travelled overland to Persia, Russia, India and Turkey, giving 'chai' and 'çay'.

The written character for tea is the same across China, but it is read cha in Mandarin and Cantonese and te in the Min dialects of Fujian ports such as Xiamen. From the early 1600s the Dutch East India Company, which bought tea from Min-speaking traders, dominated the European trade, so English, French, German and Spanish took te. Cha moved along the Silk Road, where Persian added an ending to make chay, the source of Turkish çay, Russian chay and Arabic shay. Portugal is the exception in Western Europe: its traders bought tea in Macao, where Cantonese says cha, so Portuguese says chá.

Etymological/trade-history factRead card

WonderLanguage

English long vowels changed their sound between roughly 1400 and 1700, a change now called the Great Vowel Shift. Printing reached England in the middle of it, in 1476, so spelling began to settle while pronunciation was still moving.

The Danish linguist Otto Jespersen gave the change its name in 1909. Before it, 'bite' sounded roughly like today's 'beet', and 'boot' roughly like today's 'boat': each long vowel moved higher in the mouth, and the highest ones turned into the double vowel sounds now heard in 'bite' and 'house'. Because scribes and printers were fixing spellings while this was happening, English letters often record older sounds. Other things widened the gap too: borrowed words, a mix of dialects, letters added to show a Latin root (the 'b' in 'debt'), and later changes such as the loss of the 'k' and 'gh' sounds in 'knight'. Why the shift happened at all is still debated.

Historical linguistics / Great Vowel ShiftRead card

WonderLanguage

Basque, spoken in the western Pyrenees across Spain and France, is a language isolate: linguists have not demonstrated that it belongs to any surviving language family. It is also the only surviving non-Indo-European language indigenous to western Europe.

Its speakers call the language Euskara. The nearest thing it has to a relative is Aquitanian, known only from names on Roman-era inscriptions in south-west France and usually seen as an early form of Basque or a close relative. Links to Iberian, to languages of the Caucasus and to others have been proposed, but none has been proven. Basque grammar also works differently from its neighbours': endings on nouns show their role in the sentence, and a single verb form can show who did what to whom. About 800,000 people speak it today, most of them in Spain. It is co-official with Spanish across the Basque Autonomous Community and in the Basque-speaking north of Navarre. Being an isolate does not make Basque older or simpler than other languages; it means that any relatives it once had have vanished.

Linguistic classification of BasqueRead card