Category: Interesting facts

Researchers have known for some time that learning a new language as an adult can help to prevent or delay the onset of age-related cognitive decline. But now new research, carried out in partnership by Trinity College Dublin, the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language in San Sebastian, and the Latin American Brain Health Institute in Santiago, Chile suggests that being multilingual has far-reaching positive health effects that go far beyond keeping the little grey cells fit and active.

In fact, the researchers have discovered that the more languages people speak the more they are protected against health decline relating to age. Even after factoring in issues such as education, overall health, and lifestyle, it turned out that people from countries where being multilingual is the norm were 2.17 times less likely to experience accelerated ageing compared to people living in monolingual cultures.

The researchers further believe that incorporating language acquisition into public health plans will result in healthier, happier populations into old age, with huge positive benefits at individual, community, and societal levels.

At 101translations, where language is our first love, we’re not even slightly surprised.

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If you’re interested in European military history, you may have come across the word ‘Huns’, as in the context of war, it was often used as an anti-German slur. 

But who were the Huns really?

The Huns were nomads who lived in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe between the 4th and 6th centuries CE. By 430, they had established a vast, but short-lived, empire on the Danubian frontier of the Roman empire in Europe. Under their king, Attila, they made many destructive raids into the Eastern Roman Empire.

Scholars once believed that the Huns originated from Turkic-speaking groups, but recent linguistic research has shown that they had Palaeo-Siberian ancestors, the Xiognu, and spoke a language that belonged to the Yeniseian language family, a subgroup of the so-called Palaeo-Siberian languages which were spoken in Siberia before the invasion of Uralic, Turkic and Tungusic ethnic groups. By studying placenames, scholars have also been able to learn much more than was known before about how these fascinating people ended up settling in Europe.

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The Acadians are people descended from French settlers in New France in the seventeenth and eighteen centuries. At that time, New France was located in what today are parts of Canada’s maritime provinces, parts of Quebec, and parts of Maine. In the late 1700s, a large number of them were displaced and moved to Louisiana, where they are often referred to as Cajuns; the anglicised term for ‘Acadian’. In parts of Canada, having intermarried with native populations, they also have Indigenous heritage, notably Mi’kmaq. 

Today most Acadians speak English but many also speak local dialects of Acadian French. In parts of Canada, such as New Brunswick, Acadians have some autonomy from the federal government, particularly in terms of overseeing their own education system, which is often provided through French. 

The complex history and heritage of the Acadian peoples has meant they’ve often been viewed with suspicion during periods of conflict, with the authorities doubting their loyalty to whatever government they happened to be living under at the time. Today, modern Acadians work to preserve their language, culture, and identity. 

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For many years, the prevailing wisdom was that the pyramids of Egypt were built with slave labour.

Recently, however, a team of archaeologists led by Dr Zahi Hawass have studied ancient inscriptions that suggest they were actually built by paid workmen.

These inscriptions take the form of ancient graffiti left by the gangs of men whom the researchers believe to have built the pyramids. This graffiti refers to the groups of builders with names like ‘Khufu gang,’ ‘friends of Khufu’ and ‘Drunkards of Menkaure’ and suggest a spirit of friendly camaraderie, rather than the misery of being part of a slave gang.

Together with evidence that indicates that some of the pyramid builders who passed away were buried with full honours, and were ethnic Egyptians, the data points to the builders having been highly respected members of society. Further archaeological evidence reveals their rich diet, with freshly-baked bread and plenty of meat – not exactly slave rations.

What do you think future scholars will learn from the graffiti of today?

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The term ‘vocal fry’ refers to that rather croaky, slightly breathless-sounding way of talking that, in English, became widespread from the 1990s, initially particularly among younger females in the US. In US English to this day, women much more widely use vocal fry than men. 

Technically, vocal fry is a low vocal register that occurs when the speaker partly closes their throat, causing the vocal cords to compress, becoming relatively compact and lowering the speaker’s voice. 

Vocal fry is also present in other languages. In Finnish, the use of vocal fry can indicate that it’s someone else’s turn to talk, and in Jalapa Mazatec, a minority language from the Mexican state of Oaxaca, the presence or absence of vocal fry changes the entire meaning of the word. In fact, two words that otherwise sound the same can have completely different meanings, depending on whether or not they are pronounced with vocal fry.

Perhaps because it came to be associated primarily with young women in America from the 1990s onwards, and because men are still often seen as having more authority, vocal fry in English is often interpreted as making the speaker sound weak and hesitant. But in Finland, people of both sexes who don’t use vocal fry come across as less eloquent than those that do.

Whatever you think of vocal fry, it certainly hasn’t held back Lady Gaga, whose pronouncements often bear all of its hallmark characteristics. 

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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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