Language and literature

The alphabet most likely began about 4,000 years ago among Canaanite speakers who adapted Egyptian hieroglyphs, though a Syrian find may push its origin earlier.

0 views · 2 min read

Starter thread · AI-reviewed against its sources

Scholars noticed regular similarities between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and other languages. William Jones's 1786 statement is famous, but the idea had many earlier contributors.

0 views · 2 min read

Starter thread · AI-reviewed against its sources

The first edition (1858–1928) was built from millions of quotation slips sent in by volunteer readers, sorted by assistants and editors, and defined from that evidence.

0 views · 2 min read

Starter thread · AI-reviewed against its sources

OK began as a joking abbreviation of 'oll korrect' (all correct) in a Boston newspaper in 1839, then spread through Martin Van Buren's 1840 campaign.

0 views · 2 min read

Starter thread · AI-reviewed against its sources

Hebrew never fully died, but it stopped being anyone's mother tongue for centuries. Schools, committees and settlers, with Eliezer Ben-Yehuda as symbolic leader, made it a daily language.

0 views · 2 min read

Starter thread · AI-reviewed against its sources

Deaf children in Managua, who arrived at new schools in the late 1970s with their own home gestures, merged those systems into a shared language. Later cohorts of children made it more structured.

0 views · 2 min read

Starter thread · AI-reviewed against its sources

English spelling is irregular because sounds changed while spellings stayed fixed, and French, Dutch and Latin influences, printers and no central regulator added inconsistencies.

0 views · 2 min read

Starter thread · AI-reviewed against its sources

Michael Ventris cracked Linear B in 1952, building on Alice Kober's and Emmett Bennett's analyses. He found the tablets were written in an early form of Greek.

0 views · 2 min read

Starter thread · AI-reviewed against its sources

The Voynich manuscript is a roughly 240-page illustrated codex in an undeciphered script, made in 15th-century Europe and held at Yale. Its meaning and purpose remain unknown.

0 views · 2 min read

Starter thread · AI-reviewed against its sources

Nobody knows. Ancient Greeks assumed a single poet, but most scholars now see the epics as products of a long oral tradition, and whether a 'Homer' shaped them remains debated.

0 views · 2 min read

Starter thread · AI-reviewed against its sources

Doubt rests on gaps in the records of Shakespeare's life and on his modest origins. Nearly all scholars hold that the documents support the Stratford man as author.

0 views · 3 min read

Starter thread · AI-reviewed against its sources

The Epic of Gilgamesh is an ancient Mesopotamian poem about King Gilgamesh of Uruk and his failed quest for immortality, often called the oldest surviving narrative literature.

0 views · 2 min read

Starter thread · AI-reviewed against its sources