The Language of the Olympic Games
Despite the Corona epidemic, a year late and with a lot of uncertainty, the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games started. An Olympic games event is a multinational, multicultural, multilingual gathering that attracts billions of spectators from all around the world. The term comes from the Greek word Olympias describing a four-year cycle. Beyond the sport games […]
Language and Gossip
There is nothing as delicious as hearing good gossip…. Almost everyone gossips. It comes very naturally even though we are almost unaware of when we are gossiping. More than half of our conversation time can be characterized as gossip. In most cases gossip is about people we know and only a small part of the […]
The Printing Revolution & Languages
We are in the midst of a communication revolution. There has been no precedent in history of such rapid evolution. A similar revolution, one of the greatest inventions of the previous millennium that had a worldwide impact was the invention of the printing press. The distribution of relatively low-cost books significantly increased literacy, which further […]
Idioms
It is said that in order to really know a culture one must know its idioms. What is it about idioms that is so deeply connected to the culture? It is also said that the beauty of a language is influenced by the wealth of its idioms. Are there really differences between idioms in different […]
Etymology
The fact that languages change over time is not only learned from the distant history of the evolution of languages and cultures. We all see how new words appear and change over time. Languages borrow words from each other and during the process, the words change. This migration of words from one language to another […]
Hermeneutics
Language, beyond being a means of communication, is the basis for the formation and development of human thought. Interpretation, the study of the meaning of things, has occurred throughout the years of existence of mankind. Whether it is translating concepts of ancient writings or trying to understand the hidden intentions of a modern writer or […]
Writing System
The American Nobel prize winner and writer William Faulkner said that reality is always uneven, conflicted and full of contradictions. The only way to organize it into a uniform format is to try and tell a story. The most significant legacy of humanity from the ancient world is, without a doubt, the writing system. It […]
The Rosetta Stone
Encryption and secret codes have been at the center of many processes throughout history. Winning wars and revolutions were made possible only by cracking secret codes and secret languages. But deciphering writings is also related to knowledge and cultural history. In the 19th century, long attempts were made to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphics. Although the […]
Esperanto
It is difficult to know exactly when languages began to appear in the world. Similar to other evolutionary processes, languages have evolved over a long period of time and mutated over the years, new languages appeared, some survived and others did not. Linguists observe these changes by examining the vocabulary and similarities of languages. For […]
It Sounds Better in Yiddish
The Yiddish language has a reputation of being a humor and jokes kind of language—the language of the common people. But, Yiddish also has a whole intellectual and creative side. This reputation of the language probably originated back in the 18th century, during the Enlightenment period where the language was associated with the uneducated old […]