Tea at Trianon: One Universal Word

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, November 25, 2024

One Universal Word

From IFL Science:

Word sounds, whatever language you are talking in, are generally assumed to not be connected to the meaning that word conveys. There are many different possible sounds available in languages, and across languages without common roots there is little crossover where words with the same meaning have similar sounds to them. The word dog, for example, used in one study, is "Hund" in German, "chien" in French, and "inu" in Japanese.
But one word appears to buck this trend, with the linguists finding it may be universal. That word is "huh". Huh?
"A word like Huh? – used as a repair initiator when, for example, one has not clearly heard what someone just said – is found in roughly the same form and function in spoken languages across the globe," one team of linguists from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics explained in the Ig Nobel Prize-winning study, published in PLOS ONE in 2013, adding "the similarities in form and function of this interjection across languages are much greater than expected by chance." (Read more.)