Why English is full of silent letters
English has a silent letter problem. The situation is so out of hand that it's often said that every letter of the alphabet can be found silent somewhere in our…
The etymology of “earthling”
and its interesting ending via Jess Zafarris
“Tu vis ta culture ou tu tues ta culture.”
la langue française dans Louisiane
Why doesn’t English have genders? Well… it did!
Pretty much every other language seems to have grammatical genders… so why doesn't English? Well, it used to. Old English had three genders, meaning there were at least three different…
Where did our numbers come from?
Why do our numbers look the way they look? Why do we count the way we count? These questions answered and many more in this video looking at where English…
Where does punctuation come from?!
In this episode I trace the punctuation we use every day as far back as I can. ❓Is the question mark actually a word? ❗️Where did the exclamation mark come…
It’s not yee old it’s the old: the þ in old English
Thorn or þorn (Þ, þ) is a letter in the Old English, Old Norse, Old Swedish and modern Icelandic alphabets, as well as modern transliterations of the Gothic alphabet, Middle…
No such thing as the oldest language
It's easy to find claims that certain languages are old or even the oldest, but which one is actually true? Fortunately, there's an easy (though unsatisfying) answer: none of them!…
Subtitle -A German-speaking outpost in the American Midwest
German used to be one of the most widely-spoken languages in the United States. A survey in 1900 listed 613 US-based German-language newspapers. Today, only a handful survive, and German…
Subtitle – Americans, Brits and the foreignness of English
American English and British English aren't different languages. But they're not the same either, even if they're getting closer. There are all those different words for things: diaper/nappy, faucet/tap and…