Read a novel by Charles Dickens, and you’ll still today feel transported back to the London of the eighteen-twenties. Some of that experience owes to his lavishly reportorial descriptive skills, but even more to his way with dialogue. Dickens faithfully captured the vocabulary of the times and places in which he set his stories, and for some particularly colorful characters, went as far as to render their distinctive accents phonetically: that of The Pickwick Papers’ beloved valet Sam Weller, for instance, with its swapping of “v” and “w” sounds that briefly overtook the East End. But it’s one thing to read the voice of a Londoner of that time, and quite another to hear it.
No audio recordings exist of Dickensian London, of course, but we have the next-best thing in the video above from Youtuber Simon Roper — and specifically the section that begins at about 11:30, when he performs the accent of a Londoner in the year 1826. Most everything he says should sound quite intelligible to any English-speaker today, though few, if any, will ever have encountered someone who speaks in quite the same way in real life.
In this era, Roper adds in the onscreen notes, “you can hear the start of glottal reinforcement, where a glottal stop is inserted between a vowel and a plosive consonant at the end of a word.” What’s more, “non-rhoticity (r‑loss in most positions) has caused vowels that were originally followed by ‘r’ to become centering diphthongs.”
Serious stuff, for a man who describes himself as “not a linguist.” Nevertheless, Roper has in this video assembled an impressive tour of London accents over 660 years, with “twelve recordings, all of men with suspiciously similar voices, and each one is set 60 years after the last one, and each one is the grandson of the previous one.” (When the video went viral, the New Statesman profiled him for his achievement.) The earliest, set in 1346, will sound more familiar in cadence than in content, at least to those who haven’t studied Middle English. Comprehension doesn’t become a much simpler matter for most of us moderns until about 1586, but Roper’s accent comes to sound veritably transatlantic by 1766. Perhaps not coincidentally, that was just before the Americans broke off decisively from the motherland to do things their own way — but also to preserve a few of the old ways, including ways of speech.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Think back, if you will, to the climactic scenes of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which take place in the hidden temple that contains the Holy Grail. His father having been shot by the dastardly Nazi-sympathizing immortality-seeker Walter Donovan, Indy has no choice but to retrieve the legendary cup to make use of its reputed healing powers. This entails passing through three deadly chambers, one of which has a floor covered in stones, each one labeled with a letter of the alphabet. The way through, according to Jones père’s research, is the name of God. But when Indy steps on “J” for Jehovah, it crumbles away, and he nearly plunges into the enormous pit below.
Of course, true fans will have already quoted the relevant line: “But in the Latin alphabet, Jehova begins with an I!” Those of us who first watched the movie as kids — and, for that matter, many of us who first watched it as adults — simply took that fact as given. But if we watch the RobWords video above, we can learn how and when that “I” became a “J”.
To the ancient Romans, explains host Rob Watts, these letters were one and the same, serving both vowel and consonant duty depending on the context (as in “Iulius” Caesar). Both of them date back to a “rather more complicated character” that looks like a badly contorted F, and which originated as a pictogram representing a human hand and forearm.
The letter J only emerged later, “when scribes wanted to differentiate between these two usages.” (As we’ve seen, it also offered the descendants of the Knights Templar a way to trick interlopers in their caverns.) Throughout the course of the video, Watts covers this and other curious steps in the evolution of the alphabet we use to write English and many other languages today. These produced such features as the plural of knife and wolf being knives and wolves, the seeming superfluity of Q, and — for an Englishman like Watts, an unignorable subject — the transatlantic “zed”/“zee” dividing line. Examined closely, the forms of our letters tells a millennia-spanning story whose cast includes Egyptians, Phoenicians, Canaanites, Etruscans, Greeks, Romans, and others besides. And as the experience of Indiana Jones illustrates, you never know when you’ll need its lessons.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
In years past, we’ve brought you rare recordings of Sigmund Freud and Jorge Luis Borges speaking in English. Today we present a remarkable series of recordings of the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy reading a passage from his book, Wise Thoughts for Every Day, in four languages: English, German, French and Russian.
Wise Thoughts For Every Day was Tolstoy’s last major work. It first appeared in 1903 as TheThoughts of Wise Men, and was revised and renamed several times before the author’s death in 1910. Eventually banned by the Soviet regime, the book reappeared in 1995 as a bestseller in Russia. Then, in 1997, the text was translated into English by Peter Sekirin and published as A Calendar of Wisdom. The book is a collection of passages from a diverse group of thinkers, ranging from Laozi to Ralph Waldo Emerson. “I felt that I have been elevated to great spiritual and moral heights by communication with the best and wisest people whose books I read and whose thoughts I selected for my Circle of Reading,” wrote Tolstoy in his diary.
As an old man (watch video of him shortly before he died) Tolstoy rejected his great works of fiction, believing that it was more important to give moral and spiritual guidance to the common people. “To create a book for the masses, for millions of people,” wrote Tolstoy, “is incomparably more important and fruitful than to compose a novel of the kind which diverts some members of the wealthy classes for a short time, and then is forever forgotten.”
Tolstoy arranged his book for the masses as a calendar, with a series of readings for each day of the year. For example under the date, May 9, Tolstoy selects brief passages from Immanuel Kant, Solon, and the Koran. Underneath he writes, “We cannot stop on the way to self-perfection. As soon as you notice that you have a bigger interest in the outer world than in yourself, then you should know that the world moves behind you.”
The audio recordings above were made at the writer’s home in Yasnaya Polyana on October 31, 1909, when he was 81 years old. He died just over a year later. Tolstoy apparently translated the passage himself. The English version sounds a bit like the King James Bible. The words are hard to make out in the recording, but he says:
That the object of life is self-perfection, the perfection of all immortal souls, that this is the only object of my life, is seen to be correct by the fact alone that every other object is essentially a new object. Therefore, the question whether thou hast done what thou shoudst have done is of immense importance, for the only meaning of thy life is in doing in this short term allowed thee, that which is desired of thee by He or That which has sent thee into life. Art thou doing the right thing?
Tolstoy is known to have made several voice recordings in his life, dating back to 1895 when he made two wax cylinder recordings for Julius Block. Russian literary scholar Andrew D. Kaufman has collected three more vintage recordings (all in Russian) including Tolstoy’s lesson to peasant children on his estate, a reading of his fairy tale “The Wolf,” and an excerpt from his essay “I Cannot be Silent.”
By the early nineteen-nineties, at least in the United States, Latin instruction in schools wasn’t what it had once been. Students everywhere had long been showing impatience and irreverence about their having to study that “dead language,” of course. But surely it had never felt quite so irrelevant as it did in a world of shopping malls, cable television, and the emerging internet. Thirty years ago, few students would have freely chosen to do their Latin homework when they could have been, say, listening to Nirvana. But now, in the age of Youtube, they can have both at once.
In the video above, the_miracle_aligner covers “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in a medieval (or “bardcore”) style, using not just period instrumentation but also a translation of its lyrics into Latin. Since its release a few years ago, this Colosseum-worthy version of the song that defined grunge has drawn thousands upon thousands of appreciative comments from enthusiasts of Nirvana and Latin alike.
As one of the latter points out, “most Latin words rhyme because of conjugation,” and when they don’t, the language’s unusual freedom of word order provides plenty of opportunity to make it work. Still, the song contains more than its share of truly inspired choices: another commenter calls it “just immaculate” how “the ‘hello, how low’ rhymes as ‘salvé, parve.’ ”
As tends to be the way with those of us here in the twenty-first century inclined to dig deep into a language like Latin, some take the opportunity to get into character: “I vividly remember the night Gaius Kurtus Cobainius the Elder premiered this song at the Amphitheater of Pompey in the Summer of 91AD. The plebs went nuts and were throwing Sesterti and Denari on the stage. I even saw a patrician woman lift her tunic! Oh how I miss those days.” In whatever language it’s sung, the instantly recognizable “Smells Like Teen Spirit” will send any Generation-Xers in earshot right back to the strenuous slacking of their own youth. And the cry “Oblectáte, nunc híc sumus” would have cut as sharply in the age of bread and circuses as it did in the MTV era — or, for that matter, as it does now.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
There was a time in America, not so very long ago, when conventional wisdom discouraged immigrants from speaking the language of the old country at home. In fact, “it used to be thought that being bilingual was a bad thing, that it would confuse or hold people back, especially children. Turns out we couldn’t have been more wrong.” These words are spoken by one of the variety of multilingual narrators of the recent BBC Ideas video above, which explains “why being bilingual is good for your brain” — not just if you pick up a second language in childhood, but also, and differently, if you deliberately study it as an adult.
“Learning a new language is an exercise of the mind,” says Li Wei of the Institute of Education at University College London. “It’s the mental equivalent of going to a gym every day.” In the bilingual brain, “all our languages are active, all at the same time.” (This we hear simultaneously in English and the professor’s native Mandarin.) “The continual effort of suppressing a language when speaking another, along with the mental challenge that comes with regularly switching between languages, exercises our brain. It improves our concentration, problem-solving, memory, and in turn, our creativity.”
In this century, some of the key discoveries about the benefits of bilingualism owe to the research of York University cognitive scientist Ellen Bialystok and her collaborators. Speaking a foreign language, she explains in this Guardian interview, requires using the brain’s “executive control system, whose job it is to resolve competition and focus attention. If you’re bilingual, you are using this system all the time, and that enhances and fortifies it.” In one study, she and her team found that bilinguals with advanced Alzheimer’s could function at the same cognitive levels with milder degrees of the same condition. “That’s the advantage: they could cope with the disease better.”
Mastering a foreign language is, of course, an aspiration commonly held but seldom realized. Based on personal experience, I can say that nothing does the trick quite like moving to a foreign country. But even if you’d rather not pull up stakes, you can benefit from the fact that the internet now provides the greatest, most accessible abundance of language-learning resources and tools humanity has ever known — an abundance you can start exploring right here at Open Culture. If it feels overwhelming to choose just one foreign language from this world of possibilities, feel free to use my system: study seven of them, one for each day of the week. Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s Tuesday, which means I’ve got some français à apprendre.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Artist Jim Sanborn’s massive sculpture Kryptos may inspire various reactions in its viewers, but there’s definitely a single correct interpretation.
But 78-year-old Sanborn isn’t saying what…
He wants someone else to identify it.
Kryptos’ main mystery — more like “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” to quote Winston Churchill — was hand cut into an S‑shaped copper screen using jigsaws.
Image courtesy of the CIA
Professional cryptanalysts, hobbyists, and students have been attempting to crack the code of its 865 letters and 4 question marks since 1990, when it was installed on the grounds of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
The hands-on part fell well within Sanborn’s purview. But a Masters in sculpture from Pratt Institute does not automatically confer cryptography bonafides, so Sanborn enlisted Edward Scheidt, the retired chairman of the CIA’s Cryptographic Center, for a crash course in late 20th-century coding systems.
Sanborn sampled various coding methods for the finished piece, wanting the act of deciphering to feel like “peeling layers off an onion.”
Gillogly arrived at his solution in 1999, using a Pentium II.
Stein reached the same conclusion a year earlier, after chipping away at it for some 400 hours with pencil and paper, though the CIA kept his achievement on the down low until Gillogly went public with his.
The following year the National Security Agency claimed that four of their employees, working collaboratively, had reached an identical solution in 1992, a fact corroborated by documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
This still leaves the 97-character phrase from the final panel up for grabs. Cracking it will be the penultimate step in solving Kryptos’ puzzle. As Sanborn told NPR in 2020, “that phrase is in itself a riddle:”
It’s mysterious. It’s going to lead to something else. It’s not going to be finished when it’s decoded.
The public is welcome to continue making educated guesses.
Sanborn has leaked three clues over the years, all words that can be found in the final passage of decrypted text.
BERLIN, at positions 64 — 69 (2010)
CLOCK, at positions 70 — 74 (2014)
NORTHEAST, at position 26 — 34
Have you solved it, yet?
No?
Don’t feel bad…
Sanborn has been fielding incorrect answers daily for decades, though a rising tide of aggressive and racist messages led him to charge 50 bucks per submission, to which he responds via e‑mail, with absolutely no hope of hints.
Kryptos’ most dedicated fans, like game developer /cryptologist Elonka Dunin, seen plying Sanborn with copious quantities of sushi above in Great Big Story’s video, find value in working together and, sometimes, in person.
Their dream is that Sanborn might inadvertently let slip a valuable tidbit in their presence, though that seems like a long shot.
The artist claims to have gotten very skilled at maintaining a poker face.
(Wait, does that suggest his interlocutors have been getting warmer?)
Dunin has relinquished all fantasies of solving Kryptos solo, and now works to help someone — anyone — solve it.
Sanford has put a contingency plan in place in case no one ever manages to get to the bottom of the Kryptos (ancient Greek for “hidden”) conundrum.
He, or representatives of his estate, will auction off the solution. He is content with letting the winning bidder decide whether or not to share what’s been revealed to them.
“I do realize that the value of Kryptos is unknown and that perhaps this concept will bear little fruit,” he told the New York Times, though if one takes the masses of people desperate to learn the solution and factors in Sanford’s intention to donate all proceeds to climate research, it may well bear quite a healthy amount of fruit.
Join Elonka Dunin’s online community of Kryptos enthusiasts here.
To give you a taste of what you’re in for, here are the first two panels, followed by their solutions, with the artist’s intentional misspellings intact.
1. Encrypted Text
EMUFPHZLRFAXYUSDJKZLDKRNSHGNFIVJ
YQTQUXQBQVYUVLLTREVJYQTMKYRDMFD
Decrypted Text
Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqlusion.
Decrypted Text
It was totally invisible Hows that possible? They used the Earths magnetic field X
The information was gathered and transmitted undergruund to an unknown location X
Does Langley know about this? They should Its buried out there somewhere X
Who knows the exact location? Only WW This was his last message X
Thirty eight degrees fifty seven minutes six point five seconds north
Seventy seven degrees eight minutes forty four seconds west ID by rows
View step by step solutions for the first three of Kryptos’ encrypted panels here.
Even by the standards of southeast Asia, Laos is a linguistically interesting place. As a former French colony, it remains part of la Francophonie, yet ironically, French is not its lingua franca; that would be Lao, spoken natively by just over half the population (as well, in another dialect, by many more Thais on the other side of the western border). And that doesn’t even get into the 90 other tongues spoken in the various regions of Laos, many of which sound nothing like the major languages in use. Venture far from Vientiane, up into the country’s northern highlands, and you’ll even hear a language composed entirely of whistles.
You’ll hear it if you’re lucky, anyway. As conveyed in Omi Zola Gupta and Sparsh Ahuja’s short documentary Birdsong, this language has precious few remaining native speakers — or, in the case of one artisan who communicates through a kind of traditional bamboo bagpipe called the qeej, players. They hail from Long Lan, a village inhabited by the Hmong people (who in the United States became known as an immigrant group thanks to Clint Eastwood’s film Gran Torino).
“Hmong people are romantics because we live in the mountains, surrounded by the sounds of the birds and the rodents, the winds and meadows of flowers,” says one of them. “The insects and birds are still singing in the forest,” adds another, “but we don’t hear them in the city anymore. And without the birds, how can we tell the seasons?”
Like other whistled languages (including the Oaxacan, Turkish, and Canarian ones we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture), that used by the villagers of Long Lan does not belong to the urban world. As Laura Spinney writes in the Guardian, some 80 such languages still exist in total, “on every inhabited continent, usually where traditional rural lifestyles persist, and in places where the terrain makes long-distance communication both difficult and necessary — high mountains, for example, or dense forest.” Though all of them are now endangered, “whistled languages have come into their own in surprising ways in the past. They have often flourished when there has been a need for secrecy,” as when Papua New Guineans used theirs to evade Japanese surveillance in World War II — or, as one of Birdsong’s interviewees remembers, when he had things to say meant for his girlfriend’s ears alone.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Yesterday a friend and I were standing on a New York City sidewalk, waiting for the light, when Stayin’ Alive began issuing at top volume from a nearby car.
Pavlovian conditioning kicked in immediately. We’d been singing along with the Bee Gees for nearly a minute before realizing that neither of us knew the lyrics. Like, at all.
The difference being that should I ever need to prep for karaoke, Stayin’ Alive’s lyrics are widely available online, whereas Prisencolinensinainciusol’s lyrics are kind of anyone’s guess…nonsense in any language.
Celentano improvised this gibberish in 1972 in an attempt to recreate how American rock and roll lyrics sound like to non-English-speaking Italian fans like himself.
As he told NPR’s All Things Considered through a translator during a 2012 interview:
Ever since I started singing, I was very influenced by American music and everything Americans did. So at a certain point, because I like American slang — which, for a singer, is much easier to sing than Italian — I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate…I sang it with an angry tone because the theme was important. It was an anger born out of resignation. I brought to light the fact that people don’t communicate.
And yet, his 1974 appearance in the above sketch on the Italian variety series Formula Due spurs strangers to make stabs at communication by sharing their best guess transcriptions of Prisencolinensinainciusol’s lyrics in YouTube comments, 51 years after the song’s original release.
A sampling, anchored by the chorus’ iconic and unmistakeable “all right:”
@glassjester:
My eyes lie, senseless. I guess I’m throwing pizza. Eyes.
And the cold wind sailor, freezing cold and icy in Tucson Alright.
@emanueletardino8545:
My eyes are way so sensitive And it gets so cold, it’s freezing Ice
You’re the cold, main, the same one Please let’s call ’em ‘n’ dance with my shoes off All right
@sexydudeuk2172
My eyes smile senseless but it doesn’t go with diesel all right.
@leviathan3187:
I don’t know why but I want a maid to say I want pair of ice blue shoes with eyes…awight.
Prisencolinensinainciusol’s looping, throbbing beat is wildly catchy and imminently danceable, as evidenced by Celentano’s performance on Formula Due and that of the black clad dancers backing him up during an appearance on Milleluci, another mid-70s Italian variety show, below.
The attention generated by these variety show segments — both lip synched — sent Prisencolinensinainciusol up the charts in Italy, Belgium, Germany, France, the Netherlands, the UK, and even the United States.
Its mix of disco, hip hop and funk has proved surprisingly durable, inspiring remixes and covers, including the one that served as philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s Eurovision Song Contest entry.
We’ll probably never get a firm grasp on the lyrics, despite Italian television host Paolo Bonolis’ puckish 2005 attempt to goad befuddled native English speaker Will Smith into deciphering them.
No matter.
Celentano’s supremely confident delivery of those indelible nonsense syllables is what counts, according to a YouTube viewer from Slovenia with fond memories of playing in a rock band as a teen in the 1960’s:
This is exactly how we non-English-speakers sung the then hit songs. You learned some beginning parts of lyrics so that the audience recognized the song. They heard it at Radio Luxembourg. From here on it was exactly the same style — outside the chorus of course. Adriano Celentano was always been a legend for us back in Slovenia.
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