This week's Lingua Franca was triggered by the words of the popsong, 'Unbreak my Heart'. The reknowned grammarian and former keyboard player in the soul group the Ram Jam Band, Geoff Pullum, uncovered the reversing 'un'-cryptotype while visiting Australia.
A number of maps made in north-eastern Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries featured the name 'Ulimaroa' for the continent of Australia. How that came about is a wonderfully complex story that has now been unravelled, and in which a pivotal part is played by Polynesian pigs.
For most of the history of Western civilisation, reading was not a silent activity. Indeed, according to Professor Paul Saenger, Curator of Rare Books at the Newberry Library, Chicago, all the evidence indicates that silent reading really only became possible around the 7th century AD. What stopped silent reading before that, he says, was the lack of word separation in texts: the use of continuous script.
Share your own encounter with language – while on the move – whether with a foreign tongue, or to do with a new awareness or facility with language that you discovered. When it comes to language it's not just the domain of linguists, everybody’s got a story to tell. Follow this link to contribute yours or read the stories by Tiger Webb, who plays the ultimate kind of frisbee, as well as Irina Dunn,who coined the aphorism ‘A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle’.