Category: 2023-2024

To girl or not to girl

What’s wrong, babe? You’ve hardly touched your girl dinner? With rot-girl winter throwing itself at you with the full force of a thousand-girl army, the feminine urge to ‘just decay’ is stronger than ever. To be a ‘girl’ has transformed: the hot girl has grown tired, iterated and regenerated a million times, the likes of cool girl,…
A Global Tour of Intriguing Idioms

Linguistic features, such as idioms, can offer an insight into language that goes beyond basic communication. They combine history and culture, therefore essential in truly understanding a language- especially if you wish to achieve a native-like efficiency. So let’s embark on a linguistic journey as we unravel the enchanting world of idioms from a variety of cultures. 1) Turkish Treasures Literal translation = to lose the goats Meaning = To go mad…
Unveiling the Darkness: A Look at Fairy Tales

Fairy tales are a quintessential part of childhood, unique to every culture and yet similar in their lifelong significance. One can find incorporations from fairy tales in language, with “ugly ducklings” and “wolves in sheep’s clothing” and beginnings of stories with “once upon a time’s”. Fairy tales extend to every form of entertainment; from being…
The Legacy of Linguistic Confusion: A Tapestry of Geographic Names

The River Avon runs from South Gloucestershire to Somerset. It extends from Northamptonshire to Tewkesbury. Or from Salisbury to the English Channel. There is either a very confused cartographer, or multiple rivers with the same name. In fact, in the British Isles alone, there are seven River Avon’s, all resulting from miscommunication hundreds of years ago. When…
Lost in Translation: Hunting for Words English Cannot Handle

There is a tapestry of languages that have been lost to the world. The omission is now only an echo, reverberating through the corridors of our new standardised conversations, leaving behind the lingering resonance of thoughts and expressions. Embracing Linguistic Escapades Dominated by English, many unique ways to express emotions, situations and concepts have been…
Dipping into Dialects

Across the world, there are around 160 English dialects, though only 40 of these are spoken in the UK. Dialects carry stereotypes (both positive and negative) and can influence various aspects of their speakers’ lives, bringing people closer together or farther apart. As a northerner, now living in London, the variance between English dialects has…
Worlds in Words: Exploring ‘Babel: An Arcane History’ by R.F. Kuang

“We’re here to make magic with words” It was the summer after my high school graduation, marked by the end of gruelling exams. Stuck between choosing to study Linguistics at King’s or Economics in Munich, I found myself with little to do. That’s when I picked up Babel by R.F. Kuang. Three days of continuous…
The Altaic Languages: A Real Language Family?

Language families, like any other family, can be quite complicated. The Altaic Language Family theory proposes a linguistic connection between Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, and sometimes Japonic and Koreanic languages, sparking debates amongst historical linguists. While some point to grammatical and lexical similarities as evidence of a shared language family, sceptics argue that these resemblances alone…
Now, the monkey comes out of the sleeve

Travelling over the summer, I met and interacted with a surprising number of Dutch people (despite not visiting the Netherlands). Being the language lover I am, I expressed my want to learn the Dutch language, which was met with a unanimous response of “no, it’s a useless language.” I don’t know if this is a…
Writing Systems Around the World

When embarking on the journey of learning a foreign language, you will most definitely have to conquer large vocabulary lists, tackle complex grammar patterns, and along the way, master the art of pronunciation. In some cases, you may have to begin by facing a more intimidating opponent- a completely new alphabet or writing system! Also…