G-Blogodaria

The Vatican Wants to Revive Famously Dead Language, Latin.

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It seems the Pope and the Vatican are attempting to put Latin back into the curriculum by establishing a new Papal Latin Academy to facilitate the teaching of Latin globally.

The NYT blog, Rendezvous, adorably points out: “Aspirational parents are these days more likely to want their offspring to speak Mandarin or Arabic. Knowledge of English, the modern lingua franca, is the sine qua non of survival in the global economy.”

Therefore it seems a total non sequitur that we should spend our days learning Latin, doesn’t it?

Indo-European Language Family May Have Anatolian Roots

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Linguists at the University of Auckland have traced back the roots of the Indo-European branch of languages to the time and place of origin.

Time? During the agricultural expansion, about 8500-9000 years ago.

Place? A steppe region in present-day Turkey.

How’d they figure it out? By quite literally just walking back in time with words:

The researchers started with a menu of vocabulary items that are known to be resistant to linguistic change, like pronouns, parts of the body and family relations, and compared them with the inferred ancestral word in proto-Indo-European. Words that have a clear line of descent from the same ancestral word are known as cognates. Thus “mother,” “mutter” (German), “mat’ ” (Russian), “madar” (Persian), “matka” (Polish) and “mater” (Latin) are all cognates derived from the proto-Indo-European word “mehter.”

That is fascinating.

Everybody Go Home Now: Make Nutella From Scratch

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We remember running out of Nutella on a Sunday morning while studying abroad in Milan. The supermarkets were closed and panic set in. We ended up paying twice the price for an emergency jar at the local creperie. Had we been armed with this recipe, perhaps we would have calmly solved the problem at home. Check out the recipe!

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