Latin
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The Emperor’s New Letters
When a Roman emperor updated the alphabet – and basically nobody listened to him. A common response to my profuse public pontifications about the history of the alphabet is ‘could we add new letters?’ With the phonemically faulty state of English spelling in mind, the question is one that I enjoy; it’s heartening to see… Continue reading
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Ex- a Weird Old Word Order -ploring
Once, in my halcyon days of doctoral studies, I gave an informal presentation that ended not with the typical slide “any questions?”, but rather “any answers?”. The talk’s topic fitted into my overall research into the word order of ancient Indo-European languages. My task was to acquire, present, evaluate and compare the available evidence, upon… Continue reading
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Monica, Erica, Rita, Tina: Why do so many women’s names end in A?
There’s a certain air of femininity around the letter A. For one reason, it brings a great number of modern female first names to a close. A sample of famous names, especially if skewed towards the West, will typically include a fair few examples. Among the female winners of a Nobel Prize, we find Claudia, Bertha,… Continue reading
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Cool Etymology: Chilled Jelly and Cold Gelato
In previous years, I’ve seized on the annual holiday of Christmas as inspiration for a December article. For this year, though, I fancy a foray into the weather conditions associated with that holiday: that is, the cold. Christmas imagery is inseparable from low temperatures, what with all its snow, reindeer, and jolly gentlemen in fur-lined… Continue reading
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Sázava and the Consolidation of the West
Central-Bohemian towns with 4,000 inhabitants rarely star as the headline destinations of travel vloggers and guidebooks to the Czech Republic. Prague, Brno, Karlovy Vary, Plzeň, Olomouc, Český Krumlov – these are where I’d personally send a first-time tourist. The town of Sázava, meanwhile, lying twenty miles southeast of Prague, I would reserve for the history-desperate… Continue reading
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Reflections of Trieste
Like an insufferable fin-de-siècle socialite, I’m writing this on my honeymoon, a three-stop holiday that naturally never once ventures outside the old borders of the Austrian Empire.¹ As any self-respecting new husband should, it’s giving me the time to reflect on the two dearest things in life: a beautiful wife, and language history. No other… Continue reading
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PIE was not SOV
Reading time: quite a while Having dedicated over four years of my life to the subject, I have one or two thoughts about the word order of Proto-Indo-European. Somebody somewhere had to have them. This reconstructed language – the ‘lost’ common ancestor proposed to explain the countless similarities across the Indo-European languages – has nowadays… Continue reading
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Relics in Roman Writing
Reading time: 5 minutes When we look at impressive Latin inscriptions from the days of Rome, there is something very fixed and familiar about the look of the letters. We recognise the roughly square-shaped capital letters like A, B and C as our own, and they more or less serve the same functions now as… Continue reading
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Verba Bohemica: The Oldest Latin Words in Czech
Reading time: 5-10 minutes For this month, I’d like to revisit two languages very close to my heart: Latin and Czech. Besides English, they’re the two languages I tend to spend the most time with. Specifically, this is a simple post about how the former has historically affected the latter. As a European language, it’s… Continue reading
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Spending Pounds and Pensively Pondering: pend- in English
Reading time: 5-10 minutes Just a simple piece from me for this month, in which I’d like to shine a spotlight on a Latin root that’s been remarkably successful in English vocabulary. It all goes back to hanging things. In Latin, we find the very similar verbs pendere and pendēre. They’re close not only in… Continue reading