Category: Interesting facts

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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Comedy and humour are among the most difficult types of language to translate, from both a linguistic and a cultural point of view. Verbal jokes often rely on wordplay and double meanings, which often make absolutely no sense when they are translated directly. In works of literature, translators often have to simply transcreate, which means that instead of translating the joke or funny phrase directly, they use an equivalent joke in the target language that might have a very different literal meaning, but a similar comedic impact.

That’s already pretty difficult, but now imagine the plight of the translator who is rendering a movie script in another language. She needs to not only translate or transcreate the joke to be both funny and culturally appropriate, but also ensure that the new joke isn’t much longer or shorter, and that it will work reasonably well when the voice actors dub the movie into a new language.

Translating the funnies really is no joke!

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Dictionaries may have moved largely online but the work of keeping them up to date is always ongoing. 

Novel words are coined all the time, but not all of them stick around. Words that make it into general usage become part of a dictionary’s listings. Unsurprisingly, many of the newer words in the dictionary relate to the internet, social media, and technology generally. 

Words also go out of usage all the time. And the issue of exactly when a word should be removed from a dictionary can be quite contentious. After all, a word doesn’t simply cease to have meaning just because it’s rarely, or never, used. But when dictionaries alert the public to the imminent removal of certain archaic words from their listings, people can be surprisingly nostalgic. Some dictionary enthusiasts even go so far as to use the word in letters to the newspaper in the hope that appearing in a publication will prevent the word’s erasure from the dictionary lexicon.

Sometimes old words make surprising comebacks, perhaps with a different or altered meaning. In English, the word ‘unfriend’ was used in the middle ages to describe an enemy. Today, of course, having shifted from noun to verb, it means something else.

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Bad translations from Chinese menus into western languages are a mainstay of translator humour. It just seems to be almost impossibly difficult to accurately translate the names of many delicious Chinese dishes.

The various cuisines of China are among the finest in the world. In general, China has an extremely complex culture of gastronomy, Chinese creativity is applied to the names of dishes, and many culinary terms in Chinese simply don’t have direct correlates in other languages. In English, the word ‘dumpling’, for example, is used for many Chinese dishes, all of which are unlike the dumplings that feature in western European cooking.

Perhaps a bigger question is why people feel the need to translate from Chinese at all. It makes sense to transliterate into the Roman alphabet, as otherwise non-Chinese people wouldn’t be able to read the menu – but if we are happy to adopt words like pizza and spaghetti and bouillabaisse and crumble from and into many languages, why do we need literal translations of the names of Chinese dishes?

Perhaps, as Chinese cuisine is ever-more integrated into menus outside China, these hilariously bad menu translations will become outdated, as a growing number of Chinese dishes will simply become part of our global diet.

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Dog-owners often talk to their dogs in a particular style that’s very similar to how caregivers talk to babies, which is known by researchers as ‘child-directed speech’. ‘Dog-directed speech,’ which also involves speaking more slowly, in a higher-pitched voice, with a simple vocabulary, is sometimes referred to as ‘Doggerel.’ 

A team of researchers at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary measured the brain activity of family dogs as they listened to dog-directed speech, child-directed speech, and ordinary adult conversational tones. It emerged that their brains were much more responsive to dog- and child-directed speech than to the ordinary adult tones, and also that they were more responsive to women’s voices than men’s, perhaps because women’s voices tend naturally to be higher and more melodic. 

If you’re a dog-lover, whatever language you use to address your beloved pet, there’s no need to feel silly if you do so using a version of baby-talk. Science is on your side!

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Surnames have all sorts of origins. Often they are associated with a particular place, or with a particular trade. For example, an English-speaker whose surname is ‘Cooper’ can reasonably assume that one of their ancestors worked in the barrel-making business.

In Italy, some of the most intriguing, and saddest, origin stories for surnames are associated with that country’s long history of caring for abandoned newborn infants. Italian civil records contain many examples of children for whom little background information is available because they were abandoned at or shortly after birth. Many were born out of wedlock to young, poor, unmarried mothers, who chose to leave them at a ruota dei proietti or ‘foundling wheel’ that allowed them to discreetly deposit an infant at a suitable establishment. 

Having no knowledge of who the babies’ families were, the authorities often gave them surnames such as ‘Esposito’, which means ‘exposed’ or ‘abandoned,’ ‘Innocenti’, which means ‘innocent one’ or ‘Trovato,’ which means ‘found’. Many of these surnames are still relatively common today, and anyone bearing one is likely to have an ancestor whose life started out in a foundling hospital.

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One of the team-members of 101translations recently witnessed a crime taking place and had to give a police statement. Trying to be as helpful and specific as possible, she described the assailant as having mauve trousers and a cerise top. The male police officer looked baffled, so his female colleague leaned in to explain: ‘That’s purple and red, Bob.’

Since the first research on the topic was carried out in the 1970s, investigations consistently show that women, statistically speaking, tend to have much larger vocabularies for colour than men, and that this trend hasn’t changed much despite the dramatic social shifts that have taken place in many societies since then. 

So what’s the reason for the difference?

Women in many cultures and linguistic contexts still get to choose clothes from a much wider colour palette than men so that’s probably one of the reasons, if not the main one. But research suggests that some men are also reluctant to learn more words for colours, or to use them if they know them, because of ongoing negative stereotyping of men who are seen as being interested in ‘women’s topics.’ Research also suggests that women tend to be better at discerning assorted colours and shades, although it’s not clear whether this is an innate tendency, or a learned behaviour from simply being exposed to more colour choices in their daily lives. 

The topic of sex differences in language use is a fascinating one – and a tricky area to explore, as it is often next to impossible to figure out the driving factors for the differences, which can also shift as cultural mores do.

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