18 5 / 2012
Simryn Gill used books as a raw material, choosing words such as ‘because’, ‘vessel’, ‘always’, ‘jealous’, and ‘lull’, and removing them from the books to investigate if, and how, words lose or take on meaning when taken away from their intended structures and contexts.
(via fuckyeahbookarts)
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10 5 / 2012
Archaeologists discover lost language
Evidence for a forgotten ancient language which dates back more than 2,500 years, to the time of the Assyrian Empire, has been found by archaeologists working in Turkey.
Researchers working at Ziyaret Tepe, the probable site of the ancient Assyrian city of Tušhan, believe that the language may have been spoken by deportees originally from the Zagros Mountains, on the border of modern-day Iran and Iraq.
In keeping with a policy widely practised across the Assyrian Empire, these people may have been forcibly moved from their homeland and resettled in what is now south-east Turkey, where they would have been set to work building the new frontier city and farming its hinterland.
The evidence for the language they spoke comes from a single clay tablet, which was preserved after it was baked in a fire that destroyed the palace in Tušhan at some point around the end of the 8th century BCE. Inscribed with cuneiform characters, the tablet is essentially a list of the names of women who were attached to the palace and the local Assyrian administration. Read more.
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01 5 / 2012
Visualising Etymology
Like etymology? (OF COURSE YOU DO)
Like data visualisations? (Yes, don’t we all)
Here’s an amazing blog post from Mike Kinde who takes passages of text and colour-codes each word based on the first cited language in their etymologies. It’s beautiful, and fascinating, and surprisingly effective. He goes on to compare different genres of text to look at the distribution of languages. Mark Twain has a lot of Old English words, Dickens even more, a medical journal article, unsurprisingly, has a higher proportion of Latin, and Monty Python has quite a lot of Old and Middle French!
There are PIE CHARTS.
I think as a next step I’d maybe like to see a break-down by date for things like Latin or later loans…
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28 4 / 2012
Roseberry Topping
Different hill-shapes have different names in Old English. Berg is a rounded hill or tumulus.
There are two hills here. The one called Roseberry Topping is a spectacular peaked eminence, the other has the smooth, rounded shape normally associated with berg names in Yorkshire. The Topping part of the name has only been traced back to 1610, but it may well be older.
Topping may be a Middle English term for a peaked hill. The berg element in Roseberry (now -berry) could be taken to refer to the rounded hill overlooked by the topping. So here, the one place-name encompasses the names of both hills, describing two shapes, both applied to the name of one settlement.
But mostly, I like the name because it sounds like a pudding.
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12 4 / 2012
Getting to the root of soldiers’ inscriptions
When it comes to carving out a career in the competitive world of archaeology these days, it’s all about finding your own niche – but few young archaeologists are carving out a future in their field quite as literally as Bristol University student Chantel Summerfield.
The 23-year-old PhD student has become the world’s only expert on arborglyphs – that is, tree graffiti; the inscriptions carved into tree trunks by soldiers with bayonets.
From bored squaddies on Salisbury Plain to terrified GIs trekking through Normandy in the wake of the D-Day invasions – each carving Chantel uncovers tells its own story of a soldier’s life.
“I’ve followed many of the First World War soldiers’ carvings from trees that once stood a few miles behind the front line on the Western Front, through to finding their graves in Commonwealth War Graves cemeteries,” Chantel says.
“But with the Second World War carvings – most of which were done by American GIs as they made their way through Normandy – I’ve sometimes been able to trace the soldiers’ surviving relatives. There was one, for example, that I found on Salisbury Plain that had been inscribed by an American GI as he waited for the D-Day invasion – it simply said: ‘Frank Fearing – Hudson, Massachusetts, 1945’ followed by a love heart and the name Helen. Read more.
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28 3 / 2012
“Categorization of baked goods (and pancakes) in English and Chinese” - from my blog ‘haonowshaokao’
-James
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10 2 / 2012
Colombia
El Biblioburro.
Luis Soriano Borges is the teacher.
The donkey’s name is Beto; the mare’s Alfa.
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