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Feuer & feu

The German word Feuer looks a bit like French feu and both mean 'fire'. That's a coincidence, because they're not etymologically related in any way. Feuer, like English fire, comes from West Germanic *fuir, while feu stems from the unrelated Latin word focus, 'hearth', which only later came to mean 'fire'. Focus was borrowed into English and many other languages as focus, its meaning 'focus (of a lens; of an ellipse)' created by Johannes Kepler. My new infographic tells you all about these words.

Proto-Indo-Europeans be like “*g̑n̥néh₃mi stéh₂tim” and then they take you into the middle of the steppe

Stone With 1,600-Year-Old Irish Inscription Found in English Garden

A geography teacher, Graham Senior, stumbled across a rock with mysterious incisions while tidying his overgrown garden in Coventry, England. The discovery of a small stone carved with an early form of Celtic script has caused excitement among archaeologists.

The rectangular sandstone rock was found by Graham Senior in Coventry during lockdown in 2020 while he was weeding, but its true value was only recently understood.

The 11-centimeter-long and 139-gram rectangular sandstone rock had cryptic inscriptions on it that suggested a history spanning over 1,600 years, all written in the mysterious Ogham alphabet.

Ogham is an early medieval alphabet used to write the Archaic Irish language from the 4th to the 6th century and Old Irish from the 6th to the 9th century. It is usually found carved on stones in Ireland, Wales, and western Britain. It was the first written language in Ireland. The majority of the 400 or so known inscriptions from the Archaic Irish period are family name pillars that were built to announce land ownership.

Ogham is an extremely unique writing system among all writing systems, with lines arranged in groups of one to five only. The stones provide insight into the Irish language before the use of the Latin insular script.

Finds liaison officer for the Birmingham Museums Trust, Teresa Gilmore, told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland that the discovery on an Ogham stone in the English midlands was a rare find.

“These finds do not turn up in the midlands. The bulk of Ogham inscriptions are found over in Ireland,” she said.

Professor Katherine Forsyth of Celtic Studies at the University of Glasgow conducted additional research that shed more light on the stone’s provenance. Her findings point to a period suggesting a timeframe ranging from the fifth to sixth centuries, with the possibility of an even earlier date in the fourth century.

The stone is inscribed on three of its four sides. The inscription on the stone, “Maldumcail/S/ Lass,” puzzled researchers, with interpretations pointing towards a version of the personal name Mael Dumcail, but the meaning of the S and LASS is unclear. Given the usual purpose and significance of ogham stones, it may be a location reference.

Theories regarding the origins of the stone abound, with speculations ranging from migration patterns to the presence of early medieval monasteries in the region.

The rock will be displayed at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry, to which Senior has donated it permanently. It will feature in the forthcoming Collecting Coventry exhibition, which opens on 11 May.

By Oguz Kayra.

perhaps some will disagree, but i think the world got worse when we changed the colour of the night

I love this fuckin' site.

You know we don’t actually have an accurate count of how many bilingual people there are in the US because our census asks people “do you speak a language other than English at home?” and not what some other countries might ask which is “can you comfortably have a conversation in a language other than your native language” or something similar.

When people say “20% of Americans are multilingual” they mean that 20% of Americans speak a language at home other than English.

This doesn’t account for people that speak English at home but also speak another language. I personally know multiple people who speak Spanish or another language even though they speak English at home. I know someone who speaks six languages conversationally and she’s not getting counted by these statistics because she speaks English at home.

We don’t actually know accurately how multilingual the US is. Like imagine if they just asked Dutch people if they speak a language other than Dutch at home. The Netherlands has a multilingualism rate of something like 95% but that number would probably go down substantially if you just asked if they speak Dutch at home or not.

ngl, schwa is actually kinda mid.

Just started creating pixel art a few days ago (maybe 4-5 I forgot). I thought that I'll start posting my pixel progress every time I create something. Maybe I'll post some of my pixel art from the past few days.

ALSO I accept all forms of advice to improving my pixel art because it will probably be helpful for me since I just started.

To start, I'm not too happy with how this turned out (especially that grass, and the colour of that cloud thing). Advice and constructive criticism will be very much appreciated.

Also, it's kind of blurry because this was from a screenshot I took of my art. I currently am using the aseprite trial version because I want to use it and see if pixel art is for me. So maybe sometime in the future I'll buy it, but for now, I'll use the trial version. Sorry for the blurriness, but it might stay that way for some time.