OED birthday word generator: which words originated in your birth year Do you know which words entered the English language around the same time you entered the world? Use our OED birthday word generator to find out! We’ve scoured the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to find words with a first known usage for each year from 1900 to 2004. Simply select the relevant decade and click on your birth year to discover a word which entered the English language that year. Please note that the dates given for these words refer to the current first known usage of the word. If you are a subscriber or have access to the OED, visit our guide to learn how to find your own personal OED birthday word. Click on your birth year in the left-hand column to discover your OED birthday word. Words originating in the 1900s include: barfly, n. do-gooder, n. dramedy, n. ailurophobe, n. car boot, n. wassup, int. radio, n. wiretap, n. Words originating in the 1910s include: pastiche, v. headstand, n. rubber-stamping, adj. environmentalism, n. ad-lib, v. record player, n. roomie, n. 1900s
Indo-European Languages The Indo-European languages are a family of related languages that today are widely spoken in the Americas, Europe, and also Western and Southern Asia. Just as languages such as Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian are all descended from Latin, Indo-European languages are believed to derive from a hypothetical language known as Proto-Indo-European, which is no longer spoken. It is highly probable that the earliest speakers of this language originally lived around Ukraine and neighbouring regions in the Caucasus and Southern Russia, then spread to most of the rest of Europe and later down into India. The earliest possible end of Proto-Indo-European linguistic unity is believed to be around 3400 BCE. Since the speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language did not develop a writing system, we have no physical evidence of it. The ancients came up with the explanation that the Latin language was a descendant of the Greek language. Branches of Indo-European Languages Anatolian Indo-Iranian Greek
Where did English come from? - Claire Bowern There are two other TED-Ed lessons related to this topic: How languages evolve and How did English evolve? (a lesson that fills in some of the details that we omit here due to the fact that the focus of this lesson was further in the past). There is still a great deal of debate about Indo-European, most importantly about the location of the homeland. To learn more about the distribution of languages across the world, see LL-map or The Ethnologue. What we did | Mapping the origin of Indo-European Step 1 – Building a database of cognates Cognates are similar words shared across languages and taken to indicate relatedness via common ancestry. To be diagnosed as cognate the words must have similar meaning and, most importantly, show systematic sound correspondences indicating a common origin. The table below shows an example dataset with six languages and cognate sets colour coded across four meanings. We compiled a database of word forms and cognacy judgements across 103 Indo-European languages (including 20 ancient languages) and 207 meanings. Step 2 – Location data To work out where Indo-European languages have come from, we use information about where the contemporary languages in our sample are spoken today and where the ancient languages are thought to have been spoken. Figure: Map showing language locations. Step 3 – Building family trees of languages Languages evolve through time in a manner similar to biological species. Figure: Germanic languages
The History of English (BBC animation) - LinkEngPark Anglo-Saxon The English language begins with the phrase ‘Up Yours Caesar!’ as the Romans leave Britain and a lot of Germanic tribes start flooding in, tribes such as the Angles and the Saxons – who together gave us the term Anglo-Saxon, and the Jutes – who didn’t. The Romans left some very straight roads behind, but not much of their Latin language. The Norman Conquest Click for the transcript Shakespeare Click for the transcript The History of English 2 The History of English 3 The History of English 4 Source: BBC More Series for You:
Babbler birds could shed light on human language Language: The chestnut-crowned babbler. Photo: Supplied Move over, parrots. There's another bird with some impressive "language" skills: the chestnut-crowned babbler, which lives in the Australian outback. Scientists studying the social birds have discovered that they can rearrange meaningless sounds in their calls to form different, meaningful messages. The findings, described in the journal PLOS Biology, may shed light on how the features of human language came to be. "Our results indicate that the capacity to rearrange meaningless sounds in order to create new signals occurs outside of humans," the authors wrote. It could hint at "a potential early step towards the generative phonemic system of human language", they added. One of the fundamental abilities that sets humans apart from other animals is language - the ability to string meaningless sounds together to communicate complex ideas to one another. Take the sounds A, T and B. Los Angeles Times
Playful Illustrations Make It Easy to Learn Chinese. By ShaoLan Hsueh. Elephants distinguish age, gender, and ethnicity in human voices Last week, we learned how elephants have a call that means “HUMAN”, used to alert other elephants to potential danger. This week, scientists reveal that elephants seem to know which humans might pose an actual threat: they can actually distinguish between humans’ age, gender, and ethnicity from just acoustic cues. Free-ranging elephants often encounter the cattle-herding Maasai people, who are semi-nomadic and sometimes kill elephants over conflicts over water or land for grazing. In a previous study, the scent of red robes worn by a Maasai man provoked a fearful response in elephants. To further tease this out, a team led by Karen McComb and Graeme Shannon from the University of Sussex recorded Maasai men, women, and boys, along with men of the nearby, crop-farming Kamba people. They all calmly spoke the same phrase in their local language: “Look, look over there, a group of elephants is coming.” This is the first evidence of wild animals making fine distinctions in human voices.
ToK- language-Why H is the most contentious letter in the alphabet Is it 'aitch' or 'haitch'? Photograph: Alamy The alphabet is something not to be argued with: there are 26 letters in as fixed a sequence as the numbers 1-26; once learned in order and for the "sounds they make", you have the key to reading and the key to the way the world is classified. Or perhaps not. Actually, in the course of writing my book about the history of the letters we use, Alphabetical, I discovered that the alphabet is far from neutral. In Britain, H owes its name to the Normans, who brought their letter "hache" with them in 1066. Perhaps the letter H was doomed from the start: given that the sound we associate with H is so slight (a little outbreath), there has been debate since at least AD 500 whether it was a true letter or not. The world is full of people laying down the law about the "correct" choice: is it "a hotel" or "an otel"; is it "a historian" or "an historian"?
How speaking multiple languages benefits the brain - Mia Nacamulli Amazed by what you have learned about having a bilingual brain? Then, start learning another language now! This website has tons of free lessons, games and quizzes to get you started! Pick one language or even two languages and get that gray matter growing. Speaking more than one language is like exercise for the brain? Read Radiolab blogger Chris Berube discusses the advantages of speaking multiple languages in his post “Mapping the Bilingual Brain” Want to know some more of the advantages of having a bilingual brain? Love all this brain talk? Want to learn another language (or two or three or...)? 20 words that once meant something very different Words change meaning over time in ways that might surprise you. We sometimes notice words changing meaning under our noses (e.g., unique coming to mean “very unusual” rather than “one of a kind”) — and it can be disconcerting. How in the world are we all going to communicate effectively if we allow words to shift in meaning like that? The good news: History tells us that we’ll be fine. Words have been changing meaning — sometimes radically — as long as there have been words and speakers to speak them. Nice: This word used to mean “silly, foolish, simple.” We’re human. Watch Anne Curzan’s TED Talk to find out what makes a word “real”.
justenglish Paul V. Hartman (The Capitalized syllable gets the emphasis) alacrity a-LACK-ra-tee cheerful willingness and promptnessanathema a-NATH-a-ma a thing or person cursed, banned, or reviledanodyne AN-a-dine not likely to cause offence or disagreement and somewhat dull//anything that sooths or comfortsaphorism AFF-oar-ism a short, witty saying or concise principleapostate ah-POSS-tate (also: apostasy) person who has left the fold or deserted the faith.arrogate ARROW-gate to make an unreasonable claimatavistic at-a-VIS-tic reverting to a primitive typeavuncular a-VUNC-you-lar “like an uncle”; benevolent bathos BATH-ose an anticlimaxbereft ba-REFT to be deprived of something valuable “He was bereft of reason.” cynosure SIGH-na-shore (from the Greek: “dog’s tail”) center of attention; point to which all eyes are drawn. dilettante DILL-ah-tent 1. having superficial/amateurish interest in a branch of knowledge; 2. a connoisseur or lover of the fine arts Click to read: Like this: Related
Mapping Metaphor: Home