Since it’s the feast of day Saints Cyril and Methodius, it occurred to me to wonder who else has a script named after them. pseudomonas chipped in and we came up with the following:

• Tironian notes, a shorthand system attributed to a Roman scribe called Marcus Tullius Tiro from the 1st century BCE. This seems to be an alphabetic system with an aggressively ( Read more... )

I found http://www.bbcactivelanguages.com/OurProducts/Italian/ProductViewer.aspx?ISBN=9781406679236 pretty good for learning tourist Italian a few years ago. But we're going to Scandinavia next and there isn't a direct equivalent in the same range. Does anyone have any recommendations for learning a little tourist-level Danish and/or Swedish?

Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog calls for a celebration of ancient languages. I’m not sufficiently confident in the pronunciation of languages that are in any case no longer spoken to follow suggestions involving putting up videos, but I can certainly write about some of what I learned from Orrin Robinson’s book Old English and Its Closest Relatives.
( Read more... )

Spell It Out: The Singular Story Of English Spelling, David Crystal, ISBN 978 1 84668 567 5

The bulk of this book (and for me most of the interest) is an ( Read more... )

( Books )

Addendum to previous post: don’t get the electronic version; someone did an especially terrible job of converting it from paper. Faults include:

• Some of the non-ASCII characters are represented as images. This means that they don’t scale with the rest of the text, leading to a bizarre appearance.
• Most of the tables are represented as images. ( Read more... )

I’ve been reading Old English and Its Closest Relatives by Orrin Robinson. This is a survey of a variety of Germanic languages from the past couple of millennia, starting with a general overview and then proceeding to chapters on individual languages, starting with GothicThe reader is soon invited to attempt translation of some sample ( Read more... )

This cartoon contains the Latin phrase “MENDACII IN CLOACA TRUCES SIDERA”. I’m trying to make some sense of it.

MENDACII is the genitive singular of mendacium, which has variety of meanings mostly amounting to “a lie”. Being in the genitive means that there is something “of the lie” or “of a lie”.

IN is a preposition with with a variety of ( Read more... )

Unaccountably endowed with substantially more money than sense, I pay for for the following adverts to be evenly distributed across buses in the UK. Which would annoy the greatest number of people?
Poll

The Horse, The Wheel And Language, David W. Anthony, ISBN 978-0-691-05887-0

This is another look at the question of when and where Proto-Indo-European(the inferred common ancestor of many the modern and ancient languages ( Read more... )