textproject_morbhf

Stories of Words: Arabic

You may think that most of the Arabic words that came into English refer to animals and customs that are unique to countries in northern Africa and the Middle East, where Arabic is the primary language. But you’re in for some surprises, too. You might be using words with Arabic roots every day to describe the world around you.

Stories of Words: Flight

Since the earliest times, people have looked up to the stars and wanted to travel there. They saw birds flying and tried to build machines that would help them fly, too. Legends tell of people who used wax wings or kites to attempt to fly. These attempts, of course, did not end well. 

Over hundreds of years, people built kites and boomerangs that were inspired by how birds glide through the sky. Only in the last few hundred years, though, did people have the technical skills needed to build flying machines. Once flying machines became real, new words were needed to describe them. 

Stories of Words: Names

What’s your name? Maybe you were named for your mom or dad, or for someone else in your family. Many families name babies after an older relative to honor him or her and to carry on the person’s name. Sometimes places and things are named in this way, too—to honor a person or event, or to keep an important memory alive. Words like this, in which people’s names are used to form new words, are called eponyms. Eponym is a Greek word that means “to give one’s name to something.”

Stories of Words: Chinese and Japanese Words

Both the Chinese and Japanese languages have more than one system of writing. This means that there could be more than one way to write the word hello! Because the writing systems used in these languages are quite different from the one used in English, some words are spelled in a few different ways. This often happens when people try to spell a word from another language the way it sounds in their own language.