The animal kingdom features very heavily in idioms whatever language you speak. From leapfrogging and fishing for compliments to raining cats and dogs, creatures are to be found in lots of different phrases. Here are some examples from other languages, alongside their...
With thousands of languages in existence and each of them boasting a vast vocabulary, there sometimes just isn't the perfect translation for a perfect word. Each language has its own sprinkling of untranslatable words that capture a feeling, tradition or concept that...
Summer is in full swing here in the UK. Now's the time to crack open the cool beverages and unfurl the picnic blankets from the bottom of the drawer. We can spend some quality time outdoors – at the riverside, in the park or at the beach. But with temperatures rising,...
In English, we refer to three square meals a day. Some say this quadrate term originates from the days of sailing ships, when workers would be served their meals on square-shaped wooden plates known as trenchers. These days, a square meal refers to a substantial...
Greek is an ancient language that has been spoken for thousands of years. It is considered to be one of the oldest recorded languages in the world, with its earliest written records dating back to the 15th century BC. In ancient times, the Greek language was spoken by...
You may be, quite fairly, thinking what an odd topic for an article. Yet these curious birds reveal how words are formed and how languages differ in their perspectives of one and the same thing. Read on to discover more about these creatures than you ever thought you...
Rumour once had it that the phrases one more for the road and on the wagon both came from the long journey from prison to the hangman’s noose. It has often been claimed that one more for the road came from the habit of the local inns offering prisoners a final drink...
We're all guilty of peppering our speech with words like um, like and well. Although such words don’t bear any real meaning, they do win us some time whilst something is still lingering on the tip of our tongue. These little words are called 'filler words' as they...
Local name: íslenskaLanguage family: North Germanic (part of the Indo-European family)Number of speakers: Current estimates range from 300,000 to 400,000 speakersWriting system: LatinOfficial language in: IcelandOne of the most often repeated mantra in linguistics is...
Believe it or not, in Ancient Greece the sky was not bright blue. It was bronze. Ancient Greeks were not colour blind, but instead of thinking in colours, they thought in a scale of brightness – and to them the sky seemed incredibly bright, just like shiny bronze...