Portal:Language/Did you know

Please do not add new items here. Nominate facts here.

/May 2006

...that Basque, a language isolate, is the only ergative language in Europe?
...that the first purely alphabetic script is thought to have been developed around 2000 BCE for Semitic workers in central Egypt?
...that Damin is the only non-African language to have clicks as regular speech sounds?

/June 2006

...that an agent noun is a noun derived from another word that denotes an action, and means an entity that does that action?
...that click consonants are stops produced with two articulatory closures in the oral cavity?

/July 2006

Portal:Language/Did you know/July 2006

/August 2006

Portal:Language/Did you know/August 2006

/September 2006

that European Union has 20 official languages?
that Portuguese is official language in 8 more countries apart from Portugal?
that Maltese is an Arabic language?

/October 2006

that today 6912 languages are spoken around the world? (Source:Ethnologue)
that Swahili is used as a lingua franca for East Africa and surrounding areas?
that the earliest writing system was invented by the Sumerians at ca. 34th century BC?

/November 2006

that the famous aphorism for the distinction between dialect and language "A language is a dialect with an army and navy" was formulated by Max Weinreich?
that most Balkan languages have remarkable similarities in phonology, grammar, and vocabulary?
that Finnish has 15 cases and Hungarian 17?

/December 2006

that Finnish and Hungarian are not Indo-European languages?
that a number of English words have been borrowed from Nahuathl, the language of Aztecs, through Spanish, like chocolate, tomato, coyote, avocado, chile or chili, Chiclets, cacao, mesquite, ocelot and others?

/January 2007

Portal:Language/Did you know/January 2007

/February 2007

that the Phoenician alphabet is the original ancestor script of the Roman, Greek, Cyrillic, and Arabic alphabets, as well as all Brahmic family of scripts in Asia?

that the Persian language is typologically more closely related to English than Arabic?

/March 2007

that only two continents of the world contain languages with clicks—Australia and Africa?
that India's oldest writing system, the Indus script, has never been decoded?