EAR OF CORN wants not only to explain why corn has ears, but to explore weird things like why the same word "gift" means "present" in English but "poison" in German and what the real difference between "man" and "woman" or "husband" and "wife" is. We'll investigate dwarves and their job security, why you "like" a corpse whether you want to or not, and - since you've always wanted to know it - we'll be taking a look at what "Pittsburgh" has to do with "wheelbarrow".
Mostly, we'll be investigating that murky "germanic" no-man's-land between English and it's cousin, German, but we'll be touching on other modern languages, as well as antique languages like Greek, Latin, Gothic and Sanskrit, and going all the way back to the so-called Proto Indo-European (PIE) roots.
PIE or Proto Indo-European isn't really a language, but is more a collection of fingerprints left by some ancient language from which many of our modern languages developed, forming a wide family of language "cousins", including, for example, Persian, Hindi, Greek, Latin, Russian, German, English, etc. The similarities we find among these cousin-languages we collect and call PIE. A good, understandable explanation of PIE can be found here.
I'll try to keep the language simple and as understandably unscientific as possible, so we can just have fun and dive into the depths of words' hidden meanings and how they belong to families with other words which, at first glance, seem unrelated, but reveal surprising and sometimes contradictory relationships.
And since language is the blueprint of thought, I will be throwing in German sayings just for the heck of it.
I hope you enjoy our journey to Babylon, and if you would like to share some of the insights provided here, you may quote the texts, but I ask you to link back here as the source of the information. The failure to do so can represent plagiarism in the sense of the DMCA 1998.
This blog uses the following licenses:
| (CC BY 2.0) | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ |
| (CC BY-SA 2.0) | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ |
| (CC BY-SA 3.0) | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ |
| (PD) | Public Domain |
All graphics are from approved sources. Source and license information can be found in the "alt" tag of each graphic.
