Are Words trees?
Languages and words are often talked about in terms of trees. How legit is this metaphor? Read on…
Languages and words are often talked about in terms of trees. How legit is this metaphor? Read on…
They all descend from salt, i.e. Latin sal: Read on…
Iguana is Leguan in German. How come? Read on…
Comparing the annual reports of the World Bank from seven decades shows that the language is getting more abstract and blurry. Read on…
„Seedy“ seems to be perceived as having to do with sperm (of some). Where does it actually come from? Read on…
The Gettysburg Address, as it might have been delivered by Donald Trump. Read on…
I have to confess, I still find this rather funny: Read on…
A mirror, in IT, is an array of two hard drives that are linked in order to save exactly the same data, mainly for redundancy reasons – and, as such, mirroring each other. Read on…
Picture: Read on…
Roots, Wurzeln and rādīcēs all go back to the same Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root: *u̯r(e)h₂d- (or something like that). English root is borrowed from Scandinavian. In Old Icelandic it was spelled rót, in Modern Swedish, for example, rot (pronounced like English root). Because the initial consonant cluster of PIE *u̯r- was hard to pronounce, *u̯- (PIE spelling convention for w) was dropped, Read on…