Classics, Ancient History, Linguistics, Academia and more
You can never predict how the internet will react to something. On Friday, I tweeted a picture of a bronze Etruscan statuette which I described as 'Etruscan Lisa Simpson'. I'd actually tweeted this already, about six months previously, but came across it again as I was revising a chapter. This time, Lisa caught everyone's imagination,... Continue Reading →
I was amazed to hear recently that there is a film out where the dialogue is in Rhaetic. This is one of the more obscure languages of ancient Italy, and not one which usually gets a lot of attention. [NB - some links and videos in this post include images of human remains.] Iceman (2017) is a... Continue Reading →
The UK (and many other areas of the world) has been experiencing a prolonged heatwave this summer. Some love it, and some hate it, but it's clearly been fantastic for archaeologists. In the dry weather, grass and crops dry out at different rates depending on what the soil underneath is like - where there was... Continue Reading →
Thomas Hardy was one of my favourite authors as a teenager (my friend and I had a challenge to try to read all of his novels, which we didn't quite manage). I never read much of his poetry, probably because 15-year-old me was more interested in stormy Victorian romances, but I was revisiting some of... Continue Reading →
Language is a problem for sci-fi. In any story involving contact with alien peoples or human civilisations from the distant future, there has to be a mechanism for understanding what everyone else is talking about, or most plots will never get off the ground. In Star Trek, you have the linguist Uhura, who has already presumably put... Continue Reading →
An excellently Classical post appeared on the Strong Language linguistics blog last week after someone found the phrase "what the digamma?" in a poem of 1881. I'll let you read Ben Zimmer's musings on whether this is a joke replacement of "what the dickens" or is meant as something closer to "WTF". The comments give... Continue Reading →
My very clever colleague Matt is having his viva today (good luck Matt!), and he posted this Indo-European cartoon to illustrate the occasion. (Killing a dragon is of course the linguists' version of the famous viva "snake fight", just FYI.) You can see more of Christina Skelton's great cartoons on Linear B and Indo-European over... Continue Reading →
Katherine McDonald 