Hear What the Language Spoken by Our Ancestors 6,000 Years Ago Might Have Sounded Like

in History, Language | October 14th, 2025

As scholars of ancient texts well know, the reconstruction of lost sources can be a matter of some controversy. In the ancient Hebrew and less ancient Christian Biblical texts, for example, critics find the remnants of many previous texts, seemingly stitched together by occasionally careless editors. Those source texts exist nowhere in any physical form, complete or otherwise. They must be inferred from the traces they have left behind—signatures of diction and syntax, stylistic and thematic preoccupations….

So it is with the study of ancient languages, but since oral cultures far predate written ones, the search for linguistic ancestors can take us back to the very origins of human culture, to times unremembered and unrecorded by anyone, and only dimly glimpsed through scant archaeological evidence and observable aural similarities between vastly different languages. So it was with the theoretical development of Indo-European as a language family, a slow process that took several centuries to coalesce into the modern linguistic tree we now know.

The observation that Sanskrit and ancient European languages like Greek and Latin have significant similarities was first recorded by a Jesuit missionary to Goa, Thomas Stephens, in the sixteenth century, but little was made of it until around 100 years later. A great leap forward came in the mid-nineteenth century when German linguist August Schleicher, under the influence of Hegel, published his Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages. There, Schleicher made an extensive attempt at reconstructing the common ancestor of all Indo-European languages, “Proto-Indo-European,” or PIE, for short, thought to have originated somewhere in Eastern Europe, though this supposition is speculative.

To provide an example of what the language might have been like, Schleicher made up a fable called “The Sheep and the Horses” as a “sonic experiment.” The story has been used ever since, “periodically updated,” writes Eric Powell at Archaeology, “to reflect the most current understanding of how this extinct language would have sounded when it was spoken some 6,000 years ago.” Having no access to any texts written in Proto-Indo-European (which may or may not have existed) nor, of course, to any speakers of the language, linguists disagree a good deal on what it should sound like; “no single version can be considered definitive.”

And yet, since Schleicher’s time, the theory has been considerably refined. At the top of the post, you can hear one such refinement based on work by UCLA professor H. Craig Melchert and read by linguist Andrew Byrd. See a translation of Schleicher’s story, “The Sheep and the Horses” below:

A sheep that had no wool saw horses, one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: “My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses.” The horses said: “Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool.” Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.

Byrd also reads another story in hypothetical Proto-Indo-European, “The King and the God,” using “pronunciation informed by the latest insights into PIE.”

See Powell’s article at Archaeology for the written transcriptions of both Schleicher’s and Melchert/Byrd’s versions of PIE, and see his article here to learn about the archeological evidence for the Bronze Age speakers of this theoretical linguistic common ancestor.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Hear Homer’s Iliad Read in the Original Ancient Greek

Hear What Homer’s Odyssey Sounded Like When Sung in the Original Ancient Greek

Was There a First Human Language?: Theories from the Enlightenment Through Noam Chomsky

What Ancient Greek Music Sounded Like: Listen to a Reconstruction That’s “100% Accurate”

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The Entire History of English in 22 Minutes

in History, Language | July 15th, 2025

When we speak English, we might say we’re speaking the language of Samuel Johnson, the man who wrote its first dictionary. Or we could say we’re speaking the language of Shakespeare, who coined more English terms than any other individual in history. It would make just as much sense to describe ourselves as speaking the language of the King James Bible, the mass printing of which did so much to standardize English, steamrolling flat many of the countless local variations that existed in the early seventeenth century. But as many an Englishman (and more than a few Americans) would be loath to admit, when we speak English, we are, much of the time, actually speaking French.

“In 1066, the Normans turn up and seize the English throne from the Anglo-Saxons says YouTuber Robwords in the new video above, describing the single most important event in the entire history of the English language, which he recounts in just 22 minutes. “William the Conqueror becomes king, and Norman French becomes the language of England’s élite.”

Under its new ruler, the country’s earls, thanes, and athelings would be called barons, dukes, and princes. “The now-subdued Anglo-Saxons needed to learn French words if they wanted to get by, so English absorbs a whole host of French terms associated with power, justice, art, government, law, and culture — such as power, justice, art, government, law, and culture,” to name just a few.

This thoroughgoing Frenchification gave rise to what we now call Middle English, as distinct from the Old English spoken before. As noted by RobWords, about 85 percent of Old English vocabulary is no longer in use today, yet we’re still “using Old English in every sentence that we utter,” not least when we break out such irregular-seeming plurals as mice, oxen, and wolves. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday make reference to “the Anglo-Saxons’ pre-Christian gods.” And even in the fast-changing, slang-ridden, internet-influenced, and — for better or for worse — highly “globalized” English we speak today, we can still hear dim echoes of the ancient ancestor linguists call Proto-Indo-European. Perhaps that’s why, despite being so widely spoken, English is still so tricky to learn: when we speak it, we’re speaking not just a language, but many languages all at once.

Tracing English Back to Its Oldest Known Ancestor: An Introduction to Proto-Indo-European

Where Did the English Language Come From?: An Animated Introduction

The Tree of Languages Illustrated in a Big, Beautiful Infographic

The Alphabet Explained: The Origin of Every Letter

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hear What Shakespeare Sounded Like in the Original Pronunciation

in Language | June 9th, 2025

What did Shakespeare’s English sound like to Shakespeare? To his audience? And how can we know such a thing as the phonetic character of the language spoken 400 years ago? These questions and more are addressed in the video above, which profiles a very popular experiment at London’s Globe Theatre, the 1994 reconstruction of Shakespeare’s theatrical home. As linguist David Crystal explains, the theater’s purpose has always been to recapture as much as possible the original look and feel of a Shakespearean production—costuming, music, movement, etc. But until recently, the Globe felt that attempting a play in the original pronunciation would alienate audiences. The opposite proved to be true, and people clamored for more. Above, Crystal and his son, actor Ben Crystal, demonstrate to us what certain Shakespearean passages would have sounded like to their first audiences, and in so doing draw out some subtle wordplay that gets lost on modern tongues.

Shakespeare’s English is called by scholars Early Modern English (not, as many students say, “Old English,” an entirely different, and much older language). Crystal dates his Shakespearean early modern to around 1600. (In his excellent textbook on the subject, linguist Charles Barber bookends the period roughly between 1500 and 1700.) David Crystal cites three important kinds of evidence that guide us toward recovering early modern’s original pronunciation (or “OP”).

1. Observations made by people writing on the language at the time, commenting on how words sounded, which words rhyme, etc. Shakespeare contemporary Ben Jonson tells us, for example, that speakers of English in his time and place pronounced the “R” (a feature known as “rhoticity”). Since, as Crystal points out, the language was evolving rapidly, and there wasn’t only one kind of OP, there is a great deal of contemporary commentary on this evolution, which early modern writers like Jonson had the chance to observe firsthand.

2. Spellings. Unlike today’s very frustrating tension between spelling and pronunciation, Early Modern English tended to be much more phonetic and words were pronounced much more like they were spelled, or vice versa (though spelling was very irregular, a clue to the wide variety of regional accents).

3. Rhymes and puns which only work in OP. The Crystals demonstrate the important pun between “loins” and “lines” (as in genealogical lines) in Romeo and Juliet, which is completely lost in so-called “Received Pronunciation” (or “proper” British English). Two-thirds of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the father and son team claim, have rhymes that only work in OP.

Not everyone agrees on what Shakespeare’s OP might have sounded like. Eminent Shakespeare director Trevor Nunn claims that it might have sounded more like American English does today, suggesting that the language that migrated across the pond retained more Elizabethan characteristics than the one that stayed home.

You can hear an example of this kind of OP in the recording from Romeo and Juliet above. Shakespeare scholar John Barton suggests that OP would have sounded more like modern Irish, Yorkshire, and West Country pronunciations, an accent that the Crystals seem to favor in their interpretations of OP and is much more evident in the reading from Macbeth below (both audio examples are from a CD curated by Ben Crystal).

Whatever the conjecture, scholars tend to use the same set of criteria David Crystal outlines. I recall my own experience with Early Modern English pronunciation in an intensive graduate course on the history of the English language. Hearing a class of amateur linguists read familiar Shakespeare passages in what we perceived as OP—using our phonological knowledge and David Crystal’s criteria—had exactly the effect Ben Crystal described in an NPR interview:

If there’s something about this accent, rather than it being difficult or more difficult for people to understand … it has flecks of nearly every regional U.K. English accent, and indeed American and in fact Australian, too. It’s a sound that makes people — it reminds people of the accent of their home — and so they tend to listen more with their heart than their head.

In other words, despite the strangeness of the accent, the language can sometimes feel more immediate, more universal, and more of the moment, even, than the sometimes stilted, pretentious ways of reading Shakespeare in the accent of a modern London stage actor or BBC news anchor.

For more on this subject, don’t miss this related post: Hear What Hamlet, Richard III & King Lear Sounded Like in Shakespeare’s Original Pronunciation.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

3,000 Illustrations of Shakespeare’s Complete Works from Victorian England, Presented in a Digital Archive

Take a Virtual Tour of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

How Chinese Characters Work: The Evolution of a Three-Millennia-Old Writing System

in History, Language, Writing | April 11th, 2025

Contrary to somewhat popular belief, Chinese characters aren’t just little pictures. In fact, most of them aren’t pictures at all. The very oldest, whose evolution can be traced back to the “oracle bone” script of thirteenth century BC etched directly onto the remains of turtles and oxen, do bear traces of their pictograph ancestors. But most Chinese characters, or hanzi, are logographic, which means that each one represents a different morpheme, or distinct unit of language: a word, or a single part of a word that has no independent meaning. Nobody knows for sure how many hanzi exist, but nearly 100,000 have been documented so far.

Not that you need to learn all of them to attain literacy: for that, a mere 3,000 to 5,000 will do. While it’s technically possible to memorize that many characters by rote, you’d do better to begin by familiarizing yourself with their basic nature and structure — and in so doing, you’ll naturally learn more than a little about their long history.

The TED-Ed lesson at the top of the post provides a brief but illuminating overview of “how Chinese characters work,” using animation to show how ancient symbols for concrete things like a person, a tree, the sun, and water became versatile enough to be combined into representations of everything else — including abstract concepts.

In the Mandarin Blueprint video just above, host Luke Neale goes deeper into the structure of the hanzi in use today. Whether they be simplified versions of mainland China or the traditional ones of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and elsewhere, they’re for the most part constructed not out of whole cloth, he stresses, but from a set of existing components. That may make a prospective learner feel slightly less daunted, as may the fact that roughly 80 percent of Chinese characters are “semantic-phonetic compounds”: one component of the character provides a clue to its meaning, and another a clue to its pronunciation. (Not that it necessarily makes deciphering them an effortless task.)

In the distant past, hanzi were also the only means of recording other Asian languages, like Vietnamese and Korean. Still today, they remain central to the Japanese writing system, but like any other cultural form transplanted to Japan, they’ve hardly gone unaltered there: the NativLang video just above explains the transformation they’ve undergone over millennia of interaction with the Japanese language. It wasn’t so very long ago that, even in their homeland, hanzi were threatened with the prospect of being scrapped in the dubious name of modern efficiency. Now, with those aforementioned almost-100,000 characters incorporated into Unicode, making them usable throughout our 21st-century digital universe, it seems they’ll stick around — even longer, perhaps, than the Latin alphabet you’re reading right now.

Related content:

Free Chinese Lessons

What Ancient Chinese Sounded Like — and How We Know It: An Animated Introduction

Discover Nüshu, a 19th-Century Chinese Writing System That Only Women Knew How to Write

The Improbable Invention of Chinese Typewriters & Computer Keyboards: Three Videos Tell the Techno-Cultural Story

The Writing Systems of the World Explained, from the Latin Alphabet to the Abugidas of India

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Why Are the Names of British Towns & Cities So Hard to Pronounce?: A Humorous But Informative Primer

in History, Language, Travel | February 18th, 2025

When they make their first transoceanic voyage, more than a few Americans choose to go to England, on the assumption that, whatever culture shock they might experience, at least none of the difficulties will be linguistic. Only when it’s too late do they discover the true meaning of the old line about being separated by a common language. Take place names, not just in England but even more so across the whole of Great Britain. How would you pronounce, for instance, Beaulieu, Rampisham, Mousehole, Towcester, Gotham, Quernmore, Alnwick, or Frome?

There’s a good chance that you got most of those wrong, even if you’re not American. But as explained in the Map Men video above, bona fide Brits also have trouble with some of them: a few years ago, the deceptively straightforward-looking Frome came out on top of a domestic survey of the most mispronounced names. If you’re keen on making your experience in Great Britain somewhat less embarrassing, whatever your nationality, the Map Men have put together a humorous guide to the rules of “proper” place-name pronunciation — such as they exist — as well as an explanation of the historical factors that originally made it so counterintuitive.

The evolution of the English language itself has something to do with it, involving as it does “a base of Germanic Anglo-Saxon,” a “healthy dash of Old Norse,” a “huge dollop of Norman French,” and “just a fairly detectable hint of Celtic.” British place names reflect its history of settlement and invasion, the oldest of them being Celtic in origin (the dreaded Frome, for example), followed by Latin, then Germanic Anglo-Saxon (resulting in cities with names like Norwich, whose silent W I never seem to pronounce silently enough to satisfy an Englishman), then Norse.

After centuries and centuries of subsequent shifts in pronunciation without corresponding changes in spelling, you arrive in a country “littered with phonetic booby traps.” It could all seem like a reflection of the characteristic British anti-logic diagnosed, not without a note of pride, by George Orwell. But traveling Americans gassed up on their perceptions of their own relative practicality should take a long, hard look at a map of the United States some time. Having grown up in Washington State, I ask this: who among you dares to pronounce the names of towns like Marysville, Puyallup, Yakima, or Sequim?

The Growth of London, from the Romans to the 21st Century, Visualized in a Time-Lapse Animated Map

How Londinium Became London, Lutetia Became Paris, and Other Roman Cities Got Their Modern Names

Hear the Evolution of the London Accent Over 660 Years: From 1346 to 2006

The Entire History of the British Isles Animated: 42,000 BCE to Today

The Atlas of True Names Restores Modern Cities to Their Middle Earth-ish Roots

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Tracing English Back to Its Oldest Known Ancestor: An Introduction to Proto-Indo-European

in History, Language | February 11th, 2025

People understand evolution in all sorts of different ways. We’ve all heard a variety of folk explanations of that all-important phenomenon, from “survival of the fittest” to “humans come from monkeys,” that run the spectrum from broadly correct to badly mangled. One less often heard but more elegant way to put it is that all species, living or extinct, share a common ancestor. This is true of evolution as Darwin knew it, and it could well be true of other forms of “evolution” outside the biological realm as well. Take languages, which we know full well have changed and split into different varieties over time: do they, too, all share a single ancestor?

In the RobWords video above, language Youtuber Rob Watts starts with his native English and traces its roots back as far as possible. He ascends up the family tree past Low West German, past Proto-Germanic — “a language that was theoretically spoken by a single group of people who would eventually go on to become the Swedes, the Germans, the Dutch, the English, and more” — back to an ancestor of not just English and the Germanic languages, but almost all the European languages, as well as of Asian languages like Hindi, Pashtu, Kurdish, Farsi, and Bengali. Its name? Proto-Indo-European.

Watts quotes the eighteenth-century philologist Sir William Jones, who wrote that the ancient Asian language of Sanskrit has a structure “more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident.” As with such conspicuously shared traits observed in disparate species of plant or animal, no expert “could examine all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.”

The evidence is everywhere, if you pay attention to the sort of unexpected cognates and very-nearly-cognates Watts points out spanning geographically and temporally various languages. Take the English hundred, the Latin centum, the Ancient Greek hekaton, the Russian sto, and the Sanskrit Shatam; or the more deeply buried resemblances of English heart, the Latin cordis, the Russian serdce, and the sanskrit hrd. In some cases, linguists have actually used these commonalities to reverse-engineer Proto-Indo-European words, though always with the caveat that the whole thing “is a reconstructed language; it’s our best guess of what a common ancestral language could have been like.” Was there a still older language from which the non-Proto-Indo-European-descended languages also descended? That’s a question to push the linguistic imagination to its very limits.

How Languages Evolve: Explained in a Winning TED-Ed Animation

Hear What the Language Spoken by Our Ancestors 6,000 Years Ago Might Have Sounded Like: A Reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European Language

The Alphabet Explained: The Origin of Every Letter

The Tree of Languages Illustrated in a Big, Beautiful Infographic

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How the Hugely Acclaimed Shōgun TV Series Makes Translation Interesting

in Language, Television | September 17th, 2024

Many of us grew up seeing hardback copies of Shōgun on various domestic bookshelves. Whether their owners ever actually got through James Clavell’s famously hefty novel of seventeenth-century Japan is open to question, but they may well have seen the first television adaptation, which aired on NBC in 1980. Starring Richard Chamberlain and Toshiro Mifune (and narrated by Orson Welles), that ten-hour miniseries offered an unprecedentedly cinematic experience to the home viewers of America, presenting them with things they’d never before seen on television — and things they’d never heard on television, not least numerous lines delivered in untranslated Japanese.

The idea, according to screenwriter Eric Bercovici, was to put the viewers in the shoes of Chamberlain’s protagonist John Blackthorne, an English ship pilot marooned in Japan with no knowledge of the local language. During the show’s run, newspapers printed glossaries of the Japanese words most important to the story. The second adaptation of Shōgun, which aired earlier this year on FX, does things differently. For one thing, it makes use of those helpful devices known as subtitles, which over the past four and a half decades have become not just accepted but demanded by Western audiences (even for productions in their own language).

This choice, as Evan “Nerdwriter” Puschak says in his video on the new Shōgun, “lets us into the minds and conversations of the Japanese characters,” much like the omniscient narration of Clavell’s novel. Puschak highlights how the series “uses the act of translation to explore the possibilities and limitations of communication across cultures and communication, period.” One notable example is its portrayal of the various bilingual characters who interpret for Blackthorne, each of whom does so differently according to his or her motivations. The 1980 Shōgun also had a few such scenes, but their dramatic irony was inaccessible to monolingual viewers.

Even if you speak both English and Japanese, you know how little protection that really offers against cultural misunderstandings. The new Shōgun’s dramatization of that truth has surely done its part to win the show more Emmy awards than any other single season of television. A comparison to the 1980 adaptation, which represented the height of dramatic television in its day, reveals the ways in which our expectations of the form have changed over time. Nevertheless, even the 2024 Shōgun takes its liberties, the most brazen being the use of English instead of Portuguese, the real language of first contact between Japan and the West. Clearly, Portugal has its work cut out: to raise a generation of actors ready to star in the next adaptation by the late twenty-sixties. がんばって and boa sorte.

The 17th-Century Japanese Samurai Who Sailed to Europe, Met the Pope & Became a Roman Citizen

The History of Ancient Japan: The Story of How Japan Began, Told by Those Who Witnessed It (297‑1274)

Meet Yasuke, Japan’s First Black Samurai Warrior

Let’s Learn Japanese: Two Classic Video Series to Get You Started in the Language

The Entire History of Japan in 9 Quirky Minutes

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Solving a 2,500-Year-Old Puzzle: How a Cambridge Student Cracked an Ancient Sanskrit Code

in History, Language | August 29th, 2024

If you find yourself grappling with an intellectual problem that’s gone unsolved for millennia, try taking a few months off and spending them on activities like swimming and meditating. That very strategy worked for a Cambridge PhD student named Rishi Rajpopat, who, after a summer of non-research-related activities, returned to a text by the ancient grammarian, logician, and “father of linguistics” Pāṇini and found it newly comprehensible. The rules of its composition had stumped scholars for 2,500 years, but, as Rajpopat tells it in an article by Tom Almeroth-Williams at Cambridge’s website, “Within minutes, as I turned the pages, these patterns started emerging, and it all started to make sense.”

Pāṇini composed his texts using a kind of algorithm: “Feed in the base and suffix of a word and it should turn them into grammatically correct words and sentences through a step-by-step process,” writes Almeroth-Williams. But “often, two or more of Pāṇini’s rules are simultaneously applicable at the same step, leaving scholars to agonize over which one to choose.” Or such was the case, at least, before Rajpopat’s discovery that the difficult-to-interpret “metarule” meant to apply to such cases dictates that “between rules applicable to the left and right sides of a word respectively, Pāṇini wanted us to choose the rule applicable to the right side.”

That may not be immediately understandable to those unfamiliar with the structure of Sanskrit. Almeroth-Williams’ piece clarifies with an example using mantra, one word from the language that everybody knows. “In the sentence ‘devāḥ prasannāḥ mantraiḥ’ (‘The Gods [devāḥ] are pleased [prasannāḥ] by the mantras [mantraiḥ]’) we encounter ‘rule conflict’ when deriving mantraiḥ, ‘by the mantras,’ ” he writes. ” The derivation starts with ‘mantra + bhis.’ One rule is applicable to the left part ‘mantra’ and the other to right part ‘bhis.’ We must pick the rule applicable to the right part ‘bhis,’ which gives us the correct form ‘mantraih.’ ”

Applying this rule renders interpretations of Pāṇini’s work almost completely unambiguous and grammatical. It could even be employed, Rajpopat has noted, to teach Sanskrit grammar to computers being programmed for natural language processing. It no doubt took him a great deal of intensive study to reach the point where he was able to discover the true meaning of Pāṇini’s clarifying metarule, but it didn’t truly present itself until he let his unconscious mind take a crack at it. As we’ve said here on Open Culture before, there are good reasons we do our best thinking while doing things like walking or taking a shower, a phenomenon that philosophers have broadly recognized through the ages — and, like as not, was understood by the great Pāṇini himself.

Introduction to Indian Philosophy: A Free Online Course

Can Artificial Intelligence Decipher Lost Languages? Researchers Attempt to Decode 3500-Year-Old Ancient Languages

Why Algorithms Are Called Algorithms, and How It All Goes Back to the Medieval Persian Mathematician Muhammad al-Khwarizmi

How Scholars Finally Deciphered Linear B, the Oldest Preserved Form of Ancient Greek Writing

Has the Voynich Manuscript Finally Been Decoded?: Researchers Claim That the Mysterious Text Was Written in Phonetic Old Turkish

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 10 ) |

Hear What the Language Spoken by Our Ancestors 6,000 Years Ago Might Have Sounded Like

The Entire History of English in 22 Minutes

Hear What Shakespeare Sounded Like in the Original Pronunciation

How Chinese Characters Work: The Evolution of a Three-Millennia-Old Writing System

Why Are the Names of British Towns & Cities So Hard to Pronounce?: A Humorous But Informative Primer

Tracing English Back to Its Oldest Known Ancestor: An Introduction to Proto-Indo-European

How the Hugely Acclaimed Shōgun TV Series Makes Translation Interesting

Solving a 2,500-Year-Old Puzzle: How a Cambridge Student Cracked an Ancient Sanskrit Code

Essentials

Support Us

Free Courses

Receive our Daily Email

FREE UPDATES!

GET OUR DAILY EMAIL

Free Movies

Free Language Lessons

Free eBooks

Free Audio Books

Free Textbooks

K-12 Resources

Free Art & Images

Free Music

Writing Tips

Archive

Personal Finance

Categories

Great Lectures

Sign up for Newsletter

About Us

Great Recordings

Book Lists By

Syllabi

Favorite Movies

Archives

Search