Classics, Ancient History, Linguistics, Academia and more
Myriapod Productions have released a rather lovely video in their "Mysteries of Vernacular" series tracing the etymology of the English word hearse back to the Oscan word hirpus, 'wolf'. (This was discovered and sent to me by my friend Julia, so many thanks to her! I have included some pictures of coins below, because she likes coins.) This... Continue Reading →
It's become a bit of a cliche for me that my academic talks tend to start with a map of the languages of Italy, followed by an explanation of why the map is dangerously misleading. The map that I normally use is from Wikipedia, and looks like this: Now, this map does the job in... Continue Reading →
One of my favourite things about studying an unusual language is that your research is very memorable. Once people associate you with a particular obscure language, they will immediately think of you whenever they hear about it elsewhere. And - even better - they will send you sources that you never could have found otherwise.... Continue Reading →
This week, a lot of us who teach Classical Philology and Linguistics at Cambridge have been teaching our first essay of the first year course on the sounds of Greek and Latin. I had a request from a student for a good example of the difference between long and short alpha, which really stumped me for a... Continue Reading →
Fairly regularly, someone will ask me: was there Oscan (or Venetic or Etruscan or South Picene) literature? Or, sometimes a bit more aggressively, someone asserts that there definitely wasn’t an Oscan literary culture and therefore that Oscan-speakers and their societies were just less advanced than the Greeks and/or Romans. It's not that I think this... Continue Reading →
As a learner of Greek or Latin, you are sometimes confronted by words that seem to have obvious counterparts in English - and most of the time, that's very helpful. English has borrowed lots from the ancient languages, particularly from Latin (often via French). Sometimes a word means exactly what it should in a weird... Continue Reading →
I remember when I first realised that the English word "alphabet" came from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet - alpha and beta - and somehow I felt like I'd cracked a kind of etymological code. But the list of brilliant names for alphabet terms just goes on. The word "alphabet" is of... Continue Reading →
Katherine McDonald 