Category: Languages

Many thousands of years ago, on a bright Wednesday afternoon, we, little humans, have started uttering mumbles, grunts and groans. Meaningful ones, I mean. It was so long ago though that no oral tradition nor, even less, any written record of our speaking debut can be retrieved. As a matter of fact, if you ask […]

I firmly believe that at the beginning were several Babel towers. I trust our human ancestors for having invented language from scratch several times around in different places of the globe at about the same period of time. With the power of their awakening intelligence, several groups of humans must have each developed their own […]

In French, you say C’est du chinois (litterally, ‘It’s Chinese’) when you want to express how much what you’ve heard or read is just so unintelligible. A few hundreds years ago, French people were saying C’est de l’hébreu (‘It’s Hebrew’). In English, you say ‘It’s all Greek to me’. In Swedish, you say Det är […]

Boustrophedon writing is a technique that consists in not starting every line over from the same side: the hand goes from left to right, then very logically from right to left on the next line, then again from left to right on the next line and so on. Boustrophedon was mostly used in ancient times. […]

More than six billion nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine other people than you live on Earth. Most of them are multilingual; they speak more than one language, but hopefully not all at the same time­ and everybody manages to understand each other even though sometimes there may of course be a few […]

Fictional languages are languages created from scratch for the sole purpose of being integrated into a book or a movie. The fact that some authors go to the length of creating whole new languages says a lot about their dedication to the rendering of the fictions. In the first decade of the 20th century, Marcel […]

Around four billion six hundred million years ago, gravitation and a cloud of gas gave birth to the Sun. A few million years later, Earth came to be too. We know that. Scientists have studied the evidence (that is, terrestrial, lunar and meteorite rock samples) and thanks to their knowledge (that is mostly in this […]

Motivation in language learning isn’t what people say it is. Motivation as a general rule in fact is a great inner strength that everybody gets endowed with at birth BUT its number one feature is that it comes and then it goes. Motivation does come included in the package at birth, but in fact you […]

We are a lot of animals on planet Earth to be equipped with one body, one mind, two eyes, two ears, one larynx and one tongue. Some animals display two sets of eyes; some have long tails, sharp teeth, strong carapaces. Some others are capable of seeing in the dark quite well or of uttering […]

I must tell you from the start that I am not going to drop you any name ! Because there are none in fact. It’s true that Juan Pablo de Bonet, a Spanish priest, published in 1620 the first known signed alphabet. It’s true also that in the second half of the 18th century, Charles-Michel de […]