The spoken dialog is entirely in Old Latin! Well, yes; it’s a movie, after all, so what do you expect? There surely are many movies in Old Latin, a.k.a. Archaic Latin, right? Well, maybe not. At least this one has… Read More ›
Linguistics
Following directions, a.k.a. lather-rinse-repeat
If you’ve ever built a model railroad structure (or a model airplane or whatever), you either build it from scratch, build it from a kit, or do some combination of the two. I am definitely not a scratch builder, so… Read More ›
Calendrical linguistics: What a wonderfully nerdy combination!
You’ve wondered, I’m sure, about some of our names for the months. Perhaps you are puzzled about why October is the tenth month when the name clearly suggests that it should be the eighth. Similarly for September, November, and December…. Read More ›
What’s in a (color) name?
Who cares what names Crayola chooses to use for the colors of its crayons? Do you? Do I? There was only one color name that used to bother me when I was a kid: “flesh.” Even then, I guess, I… Read More ›
Hwæt?Beowulf? newly translated for your enjoyment
The world is atwitter at the arrival of a new translation of Beowulf by Maria Dahvana Headley. Well, a certain segment of the world, anyway. And you may well wonder why. The idea of reading this epic poem has never appealed to… Read More ›
“Guess the Language”: quite a challenge!
If you heard a short sample of a language that you didn’t know, could you still guess which language it is? Quite a challenge, no? Well, in this video, you have the opportunity to see Latvian linguist Julie Maksimova face… Read More ›
A really important dispute about “OK boomer”
According to a post the other day in All Things Linguistic, it is widely believed that the correct translation of “OK boomer” into Middle Egyptian is whereas they point out that a more accurate translation would of course be Perhaps… Read More ›
The Font of the Baskervilles
The Hound Font of the Baskervilles? We’ve all learned, particularly in the last few years, to be cautious about believing what we read. Some people (though not nearly enough of us) have even learned to be cautious about what we see… Read More ›
O chess pieces, what are your names (in 79 languages)? And what did my dad have to do with it?
Chess, of course, is endlessly fascinating. For some reason, however, I no longer play chess. I never became good at it, even though my dad started me on it at an early age. Chess meant a lot to him because… Read More ›
So, Classics, which is it? Are you Latin + Greek? Or are you Racism + White Supremacy?
I started thinking about college, as one does in certain families, when I was in eighth grade. I had no idea where I wanted to go, but I was pretty sure that I would want to major in Classics. What… Read More ›
