Trail5 steps
Words without borders
Baby talk, two kinds of “we”, a lost letter, a language with no relatives, and one that came back.
Five short stops through the oddities of human language. Each one changes how you hear the words you use every day.
- I
Start with the first word almost every child says, and why it sounds the same everywhere.
No. 078PhenomenonLanguageWhy “mama” sounds the same almost everywhere Mandarin, Swahili, Persian and Spanish are unrelated, yet children everywhere call their mother something like “mama”. In Georgian, though, “mama” means father. - II
Some things look universal. Others, like a single word for “we”, are just English habits.
No. 063ConceptLanguageMany languages have two words for “we” When you say “we’re going to dinner”, are you inviting the listener? English leaves it ambiguous. Hundreds of languages don’t. - III
English itself has lost things along the way, including a whole letter.
No. 130Word originLanguage“Ye Olde Shoppe” was always pronounced “the” The “Y” in “Ye Olde” is a lost English letter, þ (thorn), in disguise. Nobody ever said “yee”. - IV
Some languages lose letters. Basque has lost all its relatives.
No. 010Word originLanguageBasque is related to no other language on Earth Spanish, French, English, Russian and Hindi are all distant cousins. Basque, spoken between Spain and France, is no one’s cousin at all. - V
And one language did what linguists say is almost impossible: it came back.
No. 057StoryLanguageThe language that came back after 1,700 years For about 1,700 years nobody spoke Hebrew as a mother tongue. Then, in 1882, a baby in Jerusalem became its first native speaker in modern times.