tungumál

Around 3,000 BCE, speakers of an early branch of the Indo-European languages decided to go for a little hike, and wound up all the way in South Siberia.

A few thousand years later, scholars discovered manuscripts in northwestern China dating to 500–800 CE that were shown conclusively to be written in a language from an early branch of Indo-European. They named this language Tocharian.

The discovery of Tocharian upset decades of research on ancient Indo-European languages and revitalized interested in them for two reasons:

Nobody even suspected that another branch of Indo-European existed, let alone in China’s Tarim Basin.

It was previously thought that the Indo-European languages were divided into eastern and western groups, based on whether the /k/ sound had changed to an /s/. The western languages that retained the /k/ were called centum languages (the Latin word for ‘hundred’, pronounced with an initial /k/), while the eastern languages with /s/ were called satem languages (the Avestan word for ‘hundred’). Yet Tocharian was a centum language sitting further east than almost any other language in the family. (Linguists later hypothesized that the centum-satem split wasn’t so much an east-west split as it was a spread of /s/ from the center of the language family outward, a change which didn’t reach the furthest members of the family).

Tocharian was written in a variant of Brahmi; here’s a sample of Tocharian script on a wooden tablet:

If you really want to challenge yourself, here’s a problem about Tocharian from the International Linguistics Olympiad:

🇮🇸 islandnr1 Follow

Iceland is the best country in the world 🥰

🇫🇴 faroeislandslover Follow

The Faroe Islands are way better

🇮🇸 islandnr1 Follow

Kys

🇫🇴 faroeislandslover Follow

Kys

🇮🇸 islandnr1 Follow

Kys

🇫🇴 faroeislandslover Follow

Kys

🇮🇸 islandnr1 Follow

Kys

🇫🇴 faroeislandslover Follow

Kys

🇮🇸 islandnr1 Follow

Fuck you you live on some tiny rock in the middle of nowhere

🇫🇴 faroeislandslover Follow

So do you and also your mother is a whore

🇮🇸 islandnr1 Follow

What's it like not having independece

🇬🇱 greenlandexists Follow

Does anyone care about us

🇩🇰 thecolonizer1000 Follow

No

It's different languages:

🇬🇧 = Faroe Islands

🇮🇸 = Færeyjar

🇸🇪 hjartlandet Follow

Sverige är bättre an Norge

🇳🇴 folknor Follow

Nei den er ikke

🇸🇪 hjartlandet Follow

Kys

🇳🇴 folknor Follow

Kys

🇸🇪 hjartlandet Follow

Kys

🇳🇴 folknor Follow

Kys

🇸🇪 hjartlandet Follow

Kys

🇳🇴 folknor Follow

Kys

🇸🇪 hjartlandet Follow

Kys

🇳🇴 folknor Follow

Kys

🇸🇪 hjartlandet Follow

Vill du kyssa

🇳🇴 folknor Follow

Når som helst

🇳🇴 folknor Follow

The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.

So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.

This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.

That’s not sad, that’s awesome.

Countries with more sheep than humans.