“In Estonia, we speak slowly,” she said. “We almost don’t open our mouths when we speak. We don’t have to articulate the words. It’s our nature. It’s colder there, and people spend more time inside, and that’s why we’re like this. I think there’s a very big difference between Estonian and Czech people, and how they speak and express themselves.”

Nohova, who lives in Prague with her Czech husband and two daughters, has since mastered both the Czech language and the art of more active articulation.

But the 35-year-old yoga instructor says even though they now speak the same language, she and her husband still have their differences, especially when it comes to a healthy lifestyle.

Regiina Nohova, a native of Estonia who now lives in Prague with her Czech husband.
​​
“In the beginning, I think we were very different about food, especially after our daughters were born,” she says. “About healthy food and how important it is. He said it wasn’t so important. And about exercise also, I think. I do yoga and he doesn’t do yoga. Even now.”

It could be argued that such differences exist in every marriage.

But a new study in the United States now suggests that it could be the language you speak that affects your attitude toward a range of healthy habits, comprising everything from diet and exercise to how much money you save for your retirement.

M. Keith Chen, an associate professor of economics at Yale University, claims that languages whose grammar contains no explicit future tense — languages like Mandarin, Japanese, German, and yes, Estonian — are spoken by people who, statistically, are healthier and wealthier.

“The Japanese have been saving [money] for decades, despite effectively negative interest rates,” he says. “The Chinese save like crazy. Germans are known as big savers. All of the Scandinavian and Nordic countries are also invariant savers. So that was the first relationship [between language and behavior] that I was really interested in.

“Is it possible that if your language doesn’t force you to think differently about the future and the present, then it’s actually easier for you to save for the future, because, well, the future feels more similar to the present to you.”

‘It Rains Tomorrow’

Chen reached his startling conclusion by gathering economic and social data from countries worldwide and then comparing them to the languages spoken in those countries.

What he found was that people in countries that ranked higher in terms of overall physical and fiscal responsibility almost invariably spoke languages categorized as having a “weak” FTR, or future-time reference.

(Think of Germany — one of the European Union’s strongest economies — where people can forecast weather without using a clear future tense by saying “Morgen regnet es,” or “It rains tomorrow.”)

English, Czech, Russian, Persian, Turkish, Georgian, and other “strong” FTR languages, by contrast, scored more poorly in terms of overall physical and fiscal responsibility.

(Think of Russia — which has some of the poorest health and lowest life expectancies in Europe — where people use an explicit future tense to talk about the weather by saying “Zavtra budet dozhd,” or “It will rain tomorrow.”)

Future Tension

Time and again, Chen says, his research indicated that it was the people with no future tense in their languages who were, in a sense, less likely to be tense in the future:

“You find exactly the same pattern,” Chen says. “Families that speak weak-FTR languages are 24 percent less likely to have ever smoked intensely — meaning more than a pack a day for a year. They’re 13 percent less likely to be obese. They have better grip strength by the time they retire. In numerous measures, they’re in better long-run health.”

Chen’s study has sparked a sensation within the linguistic community, with some analysts and opinion-writers gleefully suggesting that language may actually be to blame for some of the world’s most intractable problems, from the Greek bailout crisis to why some people can’t fit into their jeans.

Many linguists, however, have dismissed Chen’s findings outright.

Julie Sedivy, who teaches linguistics and psychology at the University of Calgary in Canada, says connecting language to behavior is “irresistible” for many people.

But she maintains that research like Chen’s rarely demonstrates that any true relationship exists between grammar and traditional characteristics like thriftiness or healthy living.

“We still have the impression that some languages are more logical, or orderly, or romantic, than others,” she says. “But this is really coming from associations that we have with the speakers of those languages, rather than the specific devices that the languages offer themselves.”

Chen’s study is currently up for academic review and has yet to be formally published.

So in the meantime, it may be too early to blame your mother tongue for the two kilos you gained last month.

By Daisy Sindelar, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Copyright (c) 2012. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

When numbers instead of letters are used to spell a whole word it is called leet – which, in leet, is written as 1337. Another example is n00b, a term for newbie. Andsoforth.

Leet originated in the 1980s in relay chat services and on bulletin boards. If you look at it for the first time it might seem difficult to understand but you’ll be surprised how quickly you will catch it. Train your brain with this example of leet:

7H15 M3554G3
53RV35 7O PR0V3
H0W 0UR M1ND5 C4N
D0 4M4Z1NG 7H1NG5!
1MPR3551V3 7H1NG5!
1N 7H3 B3G1NN1NG
17 WA5 H4RD BU7
N0W, 0N 7H15 LIN3
Y0UR M1ND 1S
R34D1NG 17
4U70M471C4LLY
W17H 0U7 3V3N
7H1NK1NG 4B0U7 17,
B3 PROUD! 0NLY
C3R741N P30PL3 C4N
R3AD 7H15.

Glad you caught that! As you’ve noticed, you can also combine the use of leet, textese and normal spelling or even morph it.

5p34k1ng 0f wh1ch, a1s0 c: Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch

When the Webster dictionary was published in 1828, contemporaries commented that it lacked real knowledge, was full of  crudities and errors, and was of little purpose. Webster was not a newcomer to the literary scene. His spelling book, called the Blue-Black Speller because of its binding, was one of the best-selling books of the 19th century. Even so, Webster took a comparatively small royalty advance on his dictionary, expecting it to sell 250,000 copies. He didn’t expect that it would go on to sell more than 30 million copies during the next 12 years.

Two of the men who would continue to benefit from Webster’s fifty years of labor were Charles and George Merriam, thus the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of today.

Perhaps the most famous dictionary is the Oxford English Dictionary. When the Philological Society of London decided in 1857 to compile the English language, they did not realize the extent of the task. Eventually in 1879, James A H Murray was appointed to gather a group of linguists to further the compilation, estimating that it would consist of 6,400 pages in two volumes. Five years later they had only reached the word ‘ant’.

In April 1928, 50 years after it was started, the Oxford English Dictionary was finally published. It consisted of 400,000 words and phrases in 10 volumes. The latest complete edition covers more than 600,00 words over 22,000 pages, includes 33,000 Shakespeare quotations, and is bound in 20 volumes. All of which, in electronic edition at 540 megabytes big, is also available on a single CD or a single USB memory stick… or online. Or – proof of progress – download it on your Kindle in less than a minute.

The first book on travel, aptly called “Travel” was published by Jehan de Mandeville (anglicized to Sir John Mandeville) in 1357. It became a best seller and was translated into 9 languages.

Trips used to be organized by individuals or small groups who accompanied their guests. In 1758, Cox & Kings became the world’s first travel agency – not necessarily escorting the travelers to their destination. Thomas Cook (1808 – 1892) also took large groups on tour and then founded his company in the 1860s. The first travel agency in the United States was founded in 1887 by Walter T. Brownell.

Tourism is the biggest industry in most countries – except the United States, where entertainment is the biggest industry.

According to Greek legend the sphinx put a riddle to all who passed by and devoured those who failed to guess it. Getting it right meant the death of the monster a claim to the throne and the hand of Queen Jocasta. After many had died, one got it right: Oedipus.

What was the riddle that Oedipus solved?

The riddle that the sphinx put:

What animal walks on four legs in the morning, on two at noon, and on three at night?

Oedipus’s answer:

Man, for in the morning, the infancy of his life, he creeps on all fours; at noon, in his prime, he walks on two feet; and, when the darkness of old age comes over him, he uses a stick for better support as a third foot.

Oedipus, a mythical Greek king, was the son of Queen Jocasta and therefore had to marry his mother.

Thus aoccdrnig to Matt Davis, Cmabrigde Uinervtisy.

The largest ever encyclopedia is the Yung-Lo Ta-Tien encyclopedia. It was commissioned in 1403 by Emperor Yongle and is also known as the Yongle Encyclopedia. Written by 2000 writers, it was completed in 1408 and bound in 11,095 volumes, of which some 400 volumes survived.