Sprache
21 cards from across every topic, each citing a source. Tap one to open it in the feed.
- "Arabic numerals" are an Indian invention.
The signs 0 to 9 emerged in India between the 1st and 4th centuries, the place-value system around 600. Arab and …
- 200 saved or 400 dead: same numbers, opposite decision.
In 1981 Tversky and Kahneman described a disease threatening 600 people. Program A saves 200 for sure. Program B saves …
- A language model only ever guesses the next word.
Large language models like ChatGPT were trained on billions of sentences to predict the most likely next word fragment. …
- A language's most common word appears twice as often as the second.
Zipf's law: rank words by frequency and the n-th is about 1/n as common as the first. In the Brown Corpus of English …
- A tax decree cracked the hieroglyphs.
In 1799, French soldiers near Rosetta in the Nile Delta found a granodiorite slab bearing the same priestly decree of …
- Deutschland, Germany, Allemagne, Niemcy, Saksa: one country, five names.
An endonym is the name a group gives itself: Deutschland. An exonym is the name from outside: Germany in English …
- English didn't lose its formal "you", it lost its informal one.
Linguists call the choice between familiar and polite pronouns the T–V distinction, after Latin tu and vos; the term …
- How a new language is born in a single generation.
Where people without a shared language must cooperate, a pidgin emerges: tiny vocabulary, little grammar. When children …
- Iceland's phone book lists you under your first name.
Most Icelanders have no family name. The second name only tells whose child you are: Jón's son is Jónsson, his daughter …
- Kaiser and Tsar are the same man: Caesar.
After Julius Caesar, Roman rulers carried 'Caesar' as part of their title; from Diocletian onwards it marked the …
- Tally sticks: medieval receipts that burned down Parliament.
Before paper was common, debts were cut as notches into a wooden stick, which was then split lengthwise: creditor and …
- The Colosseum is named after a statue that is long gone.
The building went up between roughly 70 and 80 AD and held 50,000 to 80,000 spectators. In antiquity it was simply …
- The vomitorium was not a room for vomiting.
The story that Romans threw up in special rooms during banquets so they could keep eating is a modern invention. A …
- The word 'muscle' literally means 'little mouse'.
Latin 'musculus' is the diminutive of 'mus', mouse. Roman physicians thought a flexing biceps under the skin looked …
- The word algorithm is a man's name.
Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi worked in 9th-century Baghdad. His book on calculation appeared in Latin as "Algoritmi …
- Why 'quarantine' literally means 'forty days'.
In 1377 the port city of Ragusa, today's Dubrovnik, ordered ships arriving from plague areas to wait in isolation for …
- Why September means 'seventh month' but is the ninth.
The early Roman calendar began in March and had only ten months; winter was left unnamed. September, October, November …
- Why every polite word eventually turns rude.
Steven Pinker called it the euphemism treadmill in 1994: a new, mild word gradually absorbs the flavour of the thing it …
- Why rich merchants were nicknamed 'pepper sacks'.
In the Middle Ages, pepper travelled thousands of kilometres from India to Europe, through many hands and customs …
- Why the Swiss speak one language and write another.
Diglossia, described by Charles Ferguson in 1959, means one community uses two varieties with fixed roles. The H …
- Your eyes can decide which syllable you hear.
Harry McGurk and John MacDonald showed in Nature in 1976: hear "ba-ba" while watching lips form "ga-ga" and you …