Scratch a Moscow Street, Find a Tatar
“Scratch a Russian and you will find a Tatar”—a line variously pinned on Napoleon and…
Aramaic
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A Style Guide to the Russian North
Having taken a brief inventory of my journal, I realised, with a touch of chagrin,…
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A Guide to Winged Angelology
This wooden cherub of nineteenth-century vintage once adorned a house transported from the abandoned settlement…
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The Woodcutters’ Tongue and the First Alphabet
What language did the Phoenicians speak? Phoenician, of course. In terms of linguistic classification, it…
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The Straw That Learned to Write
There was in Proto-Indo-European a word *ḱolh₂mos, “straw, stalk.” From it descend Latin culmus, German…
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The Shape and the Name
Theodosiopolis changed hands with a regularity that must have exhausted its stonemasons: Byzantines, Arabs, Byzantines…
