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100-Year-Old Hoax May Be 600-Year-Old Code

UK researchers find new patterns in mysterious manuscript

(Newser) - Many people believe that the Voynich manuscript—a book found in 1912 written in an unknown language with images of plants and astronomy—is a hoax. Cryptographers, mathematicians, and linguists have been trying to decipher the supposedly 15th-century text found by book dealer Wilfrid Voynich in 1912 for 100 years,...

Hot Twitter Account Is ... in Latin

Pope's Latin Twitter account is surprisingly popular

(Newser) - Latin may be a dead language, but it's very much alive on Twitter, thanks to an unexpectedly social-media-savvy old man: the pope. Pope Francis' Latin language Twitter account began under the auspices of Pope Benedict in January (it is the official language of the Holy See, after all), and...

Word Choices Show We&#39;re Me-Centric, Less Moral
Word Choices Show We're
Me-Centric, Less Moral
OPINION
May 21, 2013 1:22 PM CDT

Word Choices Show We're Me-Centric, Less Moral

And those long-term trends should worry left and right: David Brooks

(Newser) - Lexicologists poring over a Google database of books and word usage suggest three general traits of the past half-century, writes David Brooks in the New York Times . Society has become more individualistic (with words and phrases such as "self" and "I come first" on the rise), less moral...

Rare Dialect Dying in US: Texas-German?

Last speakers in their 60s, as professor tries to preserve it

(Newser) - Another unique American dialect is fading into obscurity, and it's a safe bet that most never knew it existed in the first place: "Texas German." It's so unusual that University of Texas linguist professor Hans Boas tells the BBC he has "found no two speakers...

Ben Franklin Tried to Change Our Alphabet

His phonetic approach never took off

(Newser) - If Benjamin Franklin were alive today, he'd probably be a dynamite texter. As Smithsonian explains, Franklin once designed a phonetic alphabet for the nation because he thought the one in place was too unwieldy. Alas, it never caught on. Some highlights of his "A Reformed Mode of Spelling,...

Jimmy's or Jimmys? Feds Wage War on Apostrophes

Punctuation in place names spawns fight

(Newser) - Residents of New York's Adirondack Mountains have a bone to pick with the federal government. At issue: punctuation. A nearby mountain known to many as Jimmy's or James' Peak, but US officials won't stand for the apostrophe in the name, leading a local supervisor to grumble, "...

Isaac Newton Tried to Invent New Language

Is it 'utor' enough for you?

(Newser) - Isaac Newton had a thing or two to say about gravity and the laws of motion, but if a lesser known creation of his took off, we'd all be speaking a different language right now. As Arika Okrent explains at the Week , Newton drew up plans for a "...

These 23 Words Have Survived 15K Years

 These 23 Words Have 
 Survived 15K Years 
new study
May 7, 2013 7:55 AM CDT

These 23 Words Have Survived 15K Years

Linguists discover 'ultraconserved words'

(Newser) - Plants and animals aren't the only things that go extinct: Most words are replaced every few thousand years, with a maximum survival of roughly 9,000 years, say linguists. But in a new study published yesterday, four British researchers say they have found 23 words that have persisted for...

Most Kids Curse Before They Learn the Alphabet

And they pick it up from ... guess who?

(Newser) - Most kids can utter an expletive before they even know their ABCs—probably because their parents (and most other adults) have such terrible pottymouths, according to a new book. In Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing, Mellissa Mohr argues that English-speakers actually use a curse word about once every...

Sweden Bows to Google, Ditches 'Ungoogleable'

Company objected to newly coined word

(Newser) - How to describe something that can't be found in a search engine? Don't say "ungoogleable" or you'll risk the wrath of the company. The Swedish Language Council has officially removed the term from a list of newly coined words after the company objected on trademark grounds,...

South Korea Finds Ancient King&#39;s Hat, With Notes Inside
South Korea Finds Ancient King's Hat, With Notes Inside
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Mar 3, 2013 7:30 AM CST

South Korea Finds Ancient King's Hat, With Notes Inside

Documents explain Seoul's official alphabet

(Newser) - The Hangeul alphabet is a big deal in South Korea: It's what replaced Chinese characters in the 15th century, it's the official script of both the North and South to this day, and it has its own national holiday. And that makes the discovery of King Sejong's...

14 Great Words With No English Equivalent
 14 Great Words the 
 English Language Lacks 
in case you missed it
Jan 19, 2013 7:00 PM CST

14 Great Words the English Language Lacks

Have you ever felt tartled?

(Newser) - You're stuffed, but you just can't stop eating because the meal is so delicious. What's the word for that again? Right, there is none, at least in English. But Georgians sum it up as "shemomedjamo." It's one of 14 interesting foreign words rounded up...

'Fiscal Cliff' Tops List of Banished Words

Of course, that doesn't mean anyone will stop saying them

(Newser) - It's the end of another year, and thus time for Michigan's Lake Superior State University to release its 38th annual List of Words to be Banished from the Queen's English for Misuse, Overuse, and General Uselessness. The dozen words and phrases that made this year's cheeky...

Experts Cracking Oldest Undeciphered Language

5,000-year-old tablets may soon yield secrets

(Newser) - Experts trying to crack the world's oldest undeciphered language say they are close to making a breakthrough that could unlock a large cache of knowledge from the ancient world. The academics are using a high-tech imaging device to scan clay tablets and capture writing in the proto-Elamite language, which...

Romney's 'Old-Timey' English Evokes Another World

Some voters are charmed by 'his 1950s language'

(Newser) - "Binders full of women" may be the Mitt Romney remark of the moment, but colleagues and friends have long marveled at his uniquely old-fashioned version of English, the New York Times reports. Mormons typically avoid salty language, and Romney's father George also spoke in a gentlemanly manner,...

Trendy Brooklyn Babies Learning French

Little ones taking in second language before they can speak

(Newser) - Despite the fact they can barely talk, some cosmopolitan babies in Brooklyn are studying French. The mommies of the tots are heeding the results of various studies suggesting that exposure to a second language when very young will improve the learning of new languages later on in life, reports DNAinfo....

Researchers Name Language After Colbert

It turns out bilingual people are good at learning fake tongues

(Newser) - America's favorite fake pundit now has his own fake language. Northwestern University researchers wanted to study whether or not knowing multiple languages helped you learn a completely unrelated one, so they made one up, dubbing it "Colbertian," NBC Chicago reports. "We had to invent a new...

Social Media Makes Girls 'Seem More Aggressive'

Twitter, Facebook changing how we speak, expert says

(Newser) - Rapid-fire Twitter and Facebook communication is making young women more "to the point" in ways that can seem aggressive, an expert tells the Daily Mail . "It’s not intentional," says Oxford University language professor Deborah Cameron. "Curtness tends to be short, sharp and to the point....

'Long' Countries Protect Languages Better: Study

Jared Diamond's 'Guns, Germs and Steel' inspires quirky study

(Newser) - Speaking an indigenous language in Chile or Italy? You're in luck. In Turkey or Russia? Not so much. So say researchers at Stanford University, who studied 147 countries and concluded that those with a wide west-east axis (as opposed to a long north-south one) tend to eliminate smaller languages...

In the Holy Land, Attempts to Revive Jesus' Language

Schools in two villages teaching Aramaic

(Newser) - In two Holy Land villages—and, randomly, Sweden—efforts are being made to revive Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke that has been almost dead for centuries. The Palestinian village of Beit Jala, near Bethlehem, and the Arab-Israeli village of Jish, in the Galilean hills where Jesus taught, were both inspired...

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