Scratch a Moscow Street, Find a Tatar
“Scratch a Russian and you will find a Tatar”—a line variously pinned on Napoleon and…
Hebrew
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Sherbet, Julep, and Hand Grenade
Last time we worked out where Kütahya’s lemon yellow came from. Now to the neighbouring…
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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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From Ice Cream to the Messiah
The conversation recently turned, as civilized discourses so often do on a sultry afternoon, to…
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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…
