Category: Interesting facts

In 1999, acclaimed Irish poet Seamus Heaney published a new translation of the Old English epic, Beowulf. While his translation won awards and was greeted with great acclaim by many, others criticised him for the liberal use of terminology from the English as spoken in Northern Ireland – the linguistic tradition in which Heaney grew up, which has profoundly marked his writing.

Heaney himself commented that he had used Northern Irish dialectal terms he knew from listening to his aunts and other relatives, and that he had seen similarities between the original Old English and some of the words he was familiar with as a child.

Heaney’s most vociferous critics took to referring to his translation as “Heaneywulf” to signal their disapproval of his treatment of the text.

Photo Source: https://susannahfullerton.com.au/13-april-1939-seamus-heaney-is-born/

The Internet has changed the world in too many ways to count. 

Almost as soon as the Internet became part of daily life, owners of interactive websites were grappling with a tricky ethical and logistical dilemma. Should they control or limit what people can say online? And if they should, how?

Today, many search engines, social media platforms, and reference sources online use special filters that identify and block words or phrases that are widely considered offensive or obscene. These filters are clever, but they’re not perfect. Many totally innocuous local and community websites and groups found themselves blocked when filters falsely identified strings of letters or words in their titles as inappropriate. 

The name of this phenomenon is the ‘Scunthorpe Problem’. Scunthorpe is a town in Leicestershire, England. In 1996, people from that area were banned from creating AOL accounts because the town’s name incorporated a four-letter word widely considered rude. 

Although filters have become more sophisticated over the years, similar problems have continued to occur. And, because the filters have a bias towards the English language, minority languages, and surnames from non-English-speaking cultures, have been disproportionately affected. 

As recently as March 2025, after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the removal of content designated ‘inclusive’, the US Department of Defense removed references to the ‘Enola Gay’ aircraft!

Photo Source: https://www.sporcle.com/blog/2017/04/the-scunthorpe-problem/

One of the lesser-known fields of psychology is ‘maledictology’ which, as the name suggests, examines how people express themselves emotionally by swearing. Swearing is studied in its neurological, psychological and social contexts.

Clearly, the decision to swear comes from the brain. It is hypothesised that swearing involves both higher-level cognitive functions, such as decision-making and language, and the subcortical system, which determines how the person will respond to stimuli in their environment.

In psychological terms, we learn how to swear as part of our normal psychological development in society. From childhood, we learn what the common swearwords of our culture are, and which circumstances prompt their use. Knowing what is, and isn’t, considered rude in different contexts is an essential element of a child’s psychosocial development.

Socially-based research examines the cultural markers that people, and societies, use to determine when a particular word is or isn’t appropriate.

Currently, maledictology remains very much a minority field of study, a contested ground between psychology and linguistics that struggles to find funding, suggesting that the taboo element of swearing permeates academia as much as any other field of endeavour. For those who are particularly interested, the academic journal Maledicta was published between 1977 and 2005.

Photo Source: https://www.tuw.edu/psychology/career-in-psychology-traits/

Luxembourg is a small European country tucked between France, Belgium, and Germany. Alongside French and German, its official language is Luxembourgish, a West Germanic language similar to several High German dialects, spoken by about three-quarters of the population. Of course, as so few speak it – fewer than 300,000 – Luxembourgers generally also speak French or German, and often both.

The tricky question of the difference between a dialect and a language raises its head here once again. Until the mid-twentieth century, Luxembourgish was considered a dialect of German, but following a rigorous process of standardisation it was promoted as an independent language in its own right.

Photo Source:  https://www.luxtimes.lu/yourluxembourg/luxembourgguide/luxembourg-s-capital-celebrates-30-years-of-unesco-status/29149917.html

The spell checker tool that is an integral feature of word processing programs like Microsoft Word has been a joy for bad spellers everywhere, but it has its flaws.

The ‘Cupertino effect’ is a term that was coined to refer to the spell checker’s annoying habit of occasionally replacing correctly spelled words that are not in its dictionary with a different, often wildly wrong, word. It is named after the fact that some older spell checkers used to replace the English word ‘cooperation’ with ‘Cupertino’ (a California city), because its dictionary had only the hyphenated variant, ‘co-operation.’

Most of the time errors like this are just a minor irritation, but when important documents aren’t carefully proof-read after running a spell check, embarrassing – and potentially even dangerous – errors can slip by. This can happen even more easily when people are writing in a language other than their mother tongue and may be relying more heavily on a spell checker.

Even with all the technology at our disposal, sometimes you just can’t beat the human touch!

Photo Source: https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/07/autocorrect-fails-how-and-why-to-turn-off-word-prediction-on-your-phone.html

Many cultures and religions have mythologies about the origin of language. Think of the Tower of Babel, which attempts to explain why there are so many languages in the world.

But did you know that many cultures also have mythologies about a divine language spoken by their god or gods?

This is the idea that the deity or deities of the culture in question spoke a ‘pure’ language that dates back to before human beings came into existence. Often, the faithful also believe that this language is still present in religious rite and ritual, and sometimes also in modern parlance. For example, some Christians see Aramaic-Hebrew, Greek and Latin as God’s languages. In Hinduism, Sanskrit is seen as the language of the gods, and in Islam, Arabic is seen as God’s language. Even modern mythologies like J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ saga imagines a sacred language, Valar, spoken by the gods.

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/selective-focus-photography-of-plant-87MIF4vqHWg?utm_content=creditCopyText&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash

The Inuit of Labrador speak Inuktitut. This was only a spoken language until the arrival of Moravian missionaries in the eighteenth century. The Moravians introduced Christianity to the area, with a very disruptive impact on the Inuit belief system and way of life. They also recorded Inuktitut in writing, enabling the population to become literate in its own language, and resulting in its preservation, when many Indigenous languages died out because of the processes of colonisation.

Photo Source: https://www.meisterdrucke.uk/fine-art-prints/Unbekannt/721595/Inuit-people-from-Labrador,-northern-Canada,-c.-1928.html

The term ‘transhumance’ refers to the practice, in mountainous regions, of bringing grazing animals such as cattle, goats, and sheep to higher areas during the summer months, where they can pasture under the watchful gaze of their herders. 

As well as the agricultural benefits, transhumance was traditionally associated with specific forms of folk music and lore derived from the long days and nights the herders spent in the highlands. 

In mountainous areas characterised by small settlements that were often quite cut off from one another during the winter months, transhumance was also a way for communities to come together, as herders from different areas would meet and interact in the meadows.

In many areas, the contact between these herders speaking the same or similar dialects provided something of a bulwark against the encroachment of the national languages that have tended in recent centuries to reduce linguistic diversity. 

Transhumance is still practised today in some areas, but as motorways and other modern forms of infrastructure now often bisect former agricultural territories and transhumance routes, it is more complicated and less common than it once was. 

It is still, however, an interesting linguistic field (pun intended!). Increasingly in southern Europe, where transhumance was once very widespread, herding is provided by migrants from North Africa and elsewhere, who bring their languages with them, altering the landscape of communication. 

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/woman-in-blue-shirt-and-white-pants-standing-on-brown-sand-during-daytime-dZ32Pdsjz60?utm_content=creditCopyText&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash

In 1972, Italian singer Adriano Celentano was fed up with the impact of American popular culture on Italian music. To make a point, he composed a song titled Prisencolinensinainciusol, whose lyrics are entirely composed of gibberish that, to Italian ears, sounded like American English. The song, in a genre combining funk, disco and a precursor of hip hop, was a massive hit in several European countries. Celentano claimed to have invented the rap genre with this song and stated that he had been inspired by the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, among other things.

Thanks in large part to YouTube, Prisencolinensinainciusol  has had a long second life, with its video racking up millions of views, and TV and radio producers using it in their soundtracks.

Photo Source: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0147983/

There are only a few recorded instances in history of an individual member of a pre-literate society creating an original writing system from scratch. One is the example of Sequoyah, a Cherokee man impressed by the concept of rendering speech in written form, which he first encountered through contact with European settlers. Seeing that their ability to write gave white settlers an advantage over the Cherokee, Sequoyah decided to right this imbalance.

While many pre-literate societies become literate in their own language by adopting an existing writing system – for instance, the Roman alphabet – Sequoyah developed his own, which he finalised in 1821. 

Having toyed with pictographs at first, Sequoyah ultimately developed a symbol for each syllable in the Cherokee language. Using printed materials as a reference, including the Bible, he developed a syllabary of 85 symbols, many of them adapted from English, Greek and Hebrew letters – but representing completely different sounds.

Initially, Sequoyah’s work aroused suspicion and he was arrested by Cherokee authorities, but when they saw how he could use writing to communicate with his daughter, whom he had taught how to read, the Cherokee people became enthusiastic about the new writing system. Literacy spread rapidly among the Cherokee, with up to 100% of them literate by around 1846; a higher rate than among Europeans settling in North America in the same time period.

Sequoyah’s work would influence many others around the world. It is believed, for example, that when a literate Cherokee emigrated to Liberia, he inspired speakers of Bassa to develop their own syllabary, and several other West African cultures did likewise. 

Photo Source: https://www.native-languages.org/cherokee_alphabet.htm