Month: November 2025

In the early Middle Ages, Ireland was a hotspot for language scholarship. While most people couldn’t read and write, literacy flourished in the monasteries, where monks created beautiful illustrated manuscripts decorated with abstract and figurative art. Mostly, these manuscripts were meticulously copied Gospels, but in the margins are scholarly comments in the Irish language, poems, and even little asides about the monks’ daily lives. 

At this time, Irish monks were also actively engaged in establishing monasteries all over Europe. Many towns and cities around Europe still reference their founders in their placenames, like St Gallen in Switzerland (named after Gall, the Irish monk who founded a monastery there) and San Cataldo in Sicily (named after Cathal). 

The monks’ manuscripts are remarkable works of art in their own right, and they are also founts of information about European history – Viking raids were common then and are often referenced – and about ecclesiastic life and thinking at the time. They are also the most important primary sources for old Irish as it was spoken and written then – and some of them even feature the unique Irish Ogham script, which is otherwise found exclusively rendered in stone. 

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From forte to andante, many of the terms that guide musicians – especially of classical music – are in Italian. 

Why is that?

The form of musical notation that we know today was first adopted by Italian composers, who in turn were the first to add words, with meanings like ‘fast’ or ‘slow’ or allegro ‘cheerfully’ to the score, indicating to the musicians how it should be played. The practice of using scores like these became widespread in Italy, and spread from there to the rest of Europe, with these Italian words being adopted as the standard. 

At this time, in the 1600s, Italians were also leading the way at printing and distributing sheet music, while the vast influence of the Catholic Church, with its headquarters in Rome, helped to spread Italian sheet music through Church channels. 

By the 1800s, with cultural nationalism on the rise across Europe, non-Italian composers started adding annotations in their own languages, often alongside the now generally-accepted Italian terms. 

Music scores do more than tell the musicians what and how to play. They also reveal many years of our shared cultural history. 

Fortissimo!

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When telephones were invented, along with them came a new dilemma. What to say when answering?

Although the word ‘hello’ did exist in English before the invention of telephones – originally from French “ho, là” (“Oh! Over there!”), mostly used as a term of surprise rather than greeting, and often spelled ‘holla’ or ‘hullo’ – prior to that time most greetings referenced the time of day: ‘Good morning,’ ‘Good evening’ and so on. 

Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, initially proposed ‘ahoy ahoy’ or ‘ahoy hoy’, derived from nautical terminology, as an effective way to start a phone conversation. But ‘hello’ caught on, and with the exception of Mr Burns on The Simpsons, nobody uses ‘ahoy hoy’ these days. And as telephone use became ever-more common, ‘hello’ came to be firmly embedded as the standard casual greeting in the English language. 

Meanwhile, of course, the phone was having similar impacts in other linguistic environments. Many languages ended up adopting a variant of ‘hello’ (like ‘allô’ in French and ‘alo’ in Turkish) but others use completely different words. In Korean, for example, people say  여보세요 (Yeoboseyo), which derives  from ‘여기’ (yeogi) meaning ‘here,’ ‘보다’ (boda) which comes from the verb meaning ‘to look’ or ‘to see,’ and ‘세요’ (seyo), a polite ending used in formal speech, and means essentially ‘Are you there?’, making it a greeting that should only really be used when answering the telephone. 

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In English, the word ‘beatnik’ comes from the slang term ‘beat’, popularised by American writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, and William S Burroughs in the 1950s. 

The Beatniks of the 1950s embraced popular music – especially jazz – as well as the copious consumption of alcohol and recreational drugs. They also gave rise to a literary movement and to a wide lexicon of words and phrases that identified them as a group. 

Many of these words and phrases are still around today. Did you ever have ‘a blast’ at a party? ‘Haul ass’ when you were driving really fast? Or refer to someone as ‘bad news’? 

Congratulations! You’re a bit of a beatnik. A cool cat, even.

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Do plants talk? Do they have a language?

Not in the sense that we do, but they do communicate.

Take for example the mycelium. This is the complex web of root-like structures underground that form fungal colonies. Through the mycelium, fungi absorb nutrients and perform other essential tasks.

In a healthy ecosystem, like a well-established forest that hasn’t been disturbed, the mycelium also serves as a sort of communication device, not just among fungal species, but from one species to another. For example, when trees are threatened by insects or diseases, they can use this network to communicate the threat to other trees with chemical signals, which can respond by producing compounds that can combat it.

As you can see, clear communication really is essential for pretty much every life form on earth!

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Wet nursing refers to the practice of giving a small baby to a lactating woman who is not its mother so that it can be breastfed. While largely replaced in the modern world by the use of formula, wet nursing was common pretty much everywhere until relatively recently. Unfortunately, in many societies, it was considered a low-status job, and very little research on the impact of wet nurses on childhood development has been carried out, while lower levels of literacy among this cohort means that few personal testimonies have been left in written form.

But contracting parents often had strong opinions about their wet nurses. Wet nurses were generally fed a nutritious diet so that they could provide their charges with healthy milk. For women who were mostly from poor backgrounds, this was one of the perks of the job. Parents were also often anxious about the ‘morals’ of wet nurses, as the perception that an infant might imbibe or somehow absorb moral laxity along with the milk was rather common.

Strangely, not much attention has been given to the matter of language. In many countries – Italy and Spain are good examples, but there are also lots of others – the mother tongue of wet nurses was different from that of the contracting parents. They often spoke a regional language or dialect, and didn’t know the language of the wealthier classes very well, if at all. In the nursery, or wherever they fed the baby, they would mostly have spoken – to the baby or to other servants – in their mother tongue, thus exposing the infant’s developing brain to different words, speech patterns and intonations.

Did wet nurses have a significant impact on the language development of the children they fed? We haven’t been able to locate any research on the topic, and would love to know if this fascinating area has indeed been studied.

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In English, ‘moose’ rhymes with ‘goose’ so people sometimes wonder why the plural isn’t ‘meese’ to rhyme with ‘geese’.

Unlike ‘goose’ which becomes ‘geese,’ the word ‘moose’, which comes from a native American Algonquian language, doesn’t change in the plural. Instead, it stays in its original form. 

So, when you’re talking about moose, it’s ‘moose’ for both singular and plural. That is actually quite standard with loanwords, and in this case, perhaps, the influence of “goose / geese” prevented the formation of “mooses” as the plural, because “that’s just not what you do with that kind of word”.

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Even in highly literate societies, the quantity of written materials that predate printing is strictly limited. That makes every surviving scrap precious to researchers. But many manuscripts are damaged, simply by the passage of time, or because of particular historical events.

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 BCE, hundreds of scrolls were buried under volcanic debris. They stayed there for many centuries until a farmer discovered them in the 18th century CE. They had been preserved by the ash and mud they were buried in, but they were also so badly burned they’d carbonised, making them extremely fragile and impossible to read. For years, whenever scholars attempted to unfurl and read them, they were often simply destroyed.

In 2023, the Vesuvius Challenge was established to encourage researchers to figure out how to read them. Using modern technology, including scanning, they have revealed that one of them appears to contain a work called ‘On Vices’ by the Greek philosopher Philodemus, an ethical treatise known in full as ‘On Vices and Their Opposite Virtues and In Whom They Are and About What’.

As these technologies become progressively more sophisticated, it will get easier for researchers to read and interpret ancient written materials and, in the process, to better understand the intellectual and quotidian lives of those who went before us.

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