For centuries, an enigmatic underworld thrived, its inhabitants conversing in a secret tongue that veiled their intentions. This clandestine dialect, known as thieves’ cant , existed from the 16th to...
Renata Flores, the 16-year-old musical prodigy hailing from Peru, has emerged as a beacon of hope for a language on the brink of fading into oblivion. Amidst the shadows of discrimination and...
Language is one of humanity's most fundamental and defining characteristics, shaping our thoughts, cultures, and societies. Among the vast array of languages that exist today, the Indo-European...
Runic script is an alphabetic system based on a non-alphabetical order row. This means that it has letters, like in many languages, but the letters are not arranged in a standard alphabetical order...
Ever since Darwin brought up the fact that the human race had apes as distant ancestors, modern humans have been uneasy and a little defensive. They mocked the simian nature of Australopithecus ,...
From “ cut off your nose to spite your face ” to “ saved by the bell ,” everyday we employ words and sayings inherited from the tapestry of cultural influences which have shaped the English language...
Since the 1960s, archaeologists in Central Asia have found rocks carved with a mysterious unknown language. Now, a team from the University of Cologne has deciphered the unknown script, revealing it...
Today, the word "Aryan" has become synonymous with all sorts of negative connotations, including theories of racial superiority and white supremacy . This association has led to a widespread...
By Ken Drinkwater et al. / The Conversation There’s a new group of people on Earth who believe they’re aliens. Star people, or starseeds, are individuals who believe they have come to Earth from...
Language is a powerful tool that allows us to communicate with one another across time and space. Through language , we are able to share our stories, our ideas, and our cultures with others. In this...
Artificial intelligence has now officially seeped into ancient history. Linguists at the Institute for Assyriology at Ludwig Maximilian University in Germany have created an artificial intelligence (...
The most well-known tale of how different languages came to be, at least in areas where Judaism and Christianity are prevalent, is recorded in the Bible, in Genesis 11:1–9 . According to the...
The PLATINUM project claims to be a “Partnership for Learning and Teaching in University Mathematics.” The study began with the goal of analyzing existing Latin papyrus texts dating to the 1st to 8th...
If you’ve ever heard the saying “cut off your nose to spite your face,” have you ever wondered where it came from? Legend has it that Saint Aebbe, also known as Saint Ebba or Æbbe the Younger, was a...
A grammatical puzzle from ancient India has baffled scholars for 2,500 years. Now, a Cambridge scientist has finally cracked the meta-code underlying the ancient ‘language machine’. Pāṇini was a...
Cussing has been around since the time we could stub our toes. Though we’re all familiar with the swear words of the modern age, what about swear words from before our time? Believe it or not, there...
A linguistic expert has decoded curious symbols on a 2,100-years-old bronze hand that was discovered last year at an Iron Age castle in Spain. The symbols represent the “earliest” text ever...
Conventional archaeology claims that writing was not invented until some time between 3000 and 4000 BC in Sumeria . However, the discovery of a far older artifact in northern Greece appears to...
As crazy as it sounds, it’s now well attested that the letter “A” started out its evolution as the Egyptian hieroglyph for an ox. But its truly mind-blowing transformation came when turquoise miners...
A new study has shown that the origins of human communication began with hand gestures, and not sounds. The research team discovered this after tasking volunteers to describe words using grunts and...
In 1798, the French under Napoleon Bonaparte launched a military campaign in Egypt. Along with soldiers and military personnel, Napoleon brought a large number of scholars and scientists known as...
An isolated African script is revealing secrets about the unknown evolutionary origins of handwriting and the development of writing. The Vai script was created just two centuries ago to solve the...
Researchers excavating an estate dating back to the 12th and 15th century, have discovered a complete birch bark letter in the historic city center of Veliky Novgorod in north-western Russia. The...
When Irish academic, Dr. Martin Worthington, embarked on learning how to speak the now-extinct Babylonian language of ancient Mesopotamia, little did he know that his knowledge would be used in a...