language

TIL English did not originally have 'orange' as a basic colour word. The fruit came first. Before the colour name caught on, English speakers described that shade as 'yellow-red' AKA Old English 'geoluhred'! Only after oranges became familiar did the colour become 'orange'.

Forgot to post here on the 9th! 🇮🇹Italian course update 09/06/26🇮🇹 👽Klingon course update 09/06/26👽 🇪🇸Spanish course release 09/06/26🇪🇸 🇩🇪German course update 19/06/26🇩🇪 Visit the discord to see the exact changelogs!!

TIL 'Arctic' means 'of the bear' , not because of polar bears, but because it was named after the northern Bear constellation. 'Antarctic' literally means the place opposite the bear!

TIL Ancient Egyptian was cracked with help from its last surviving form. Champollion did not solve hieroglyphs from the Rosetta Stone alone though, he also knew Coptic, the final stage of Egyptian!

TIL our ABCs are older than Rome! Alphabetical order as we know it already shows up in Ugaritic over 3,000 years ago. That order was kept by Phoenician, then Greek, then Latin, which is why we still say A B C D.

TIL English speakers usually describe smells by source - 'like cinnamon', 'like smoke'. Jahai, a language of the Malay Peninsula, has around a dozen abstract smell words used the way English uses colour words. 'Smells are hard to name' is not a human problem so much as it is an English problem!

Welcome to February's What's new with Lingonaut! lingonaut.app/blog/the-big... We cover: * Build 50 and Android Build 5 * The bug * Overhauls to Czech, German & Finnish * Welsh, Italian and Klingon enter the ring! * New Launchpad and new management! * Android beta is now open for more tiers!

🇩🇪German course update 19/02/26🇩🇪 Numerous fixes Redistributed lessons to be less tail-end-heavy Entire course is now completable from start to finish! Credits: @WrenMala08, @Fuchsteufel, @Adrian7 , @ElMago, @pilvi#2140

Welcome to January's What's new with Lingonaut! Android's out!, our video did gangbusters + new courses - WNWL lingonaut.app/blog/android... We cover: The Android Alpha Our video going gangbusters Our spreading the word last month throughout socials German + Finnish overhauls + the Spanish course

www.patreon.com/posts/androi... The android alpha was released yesterday and invitation links were sent out throughout the night. As a reminder, if you have or have ever had an Earth (Terrestrial) pledge or above, you get access to alphas betas three months early!

Our What is Lingonaut? video is out! Please give it a watch and a like and a subscribe perhaps 👀 www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMRk...

TIL Arabic 3-10 flip gender and take a genitive plural noun! Feminine noun becomes masculine numeral form and Masculine noun becomes feminine numeral form. Examples: 3 books = thalathatu kutubin, 3 cars = thalathu sayyaratin. 1-2 agree with the noun and 11-19 follow different rules!

TIL Your brain hears shapes. Across many languages, people match a spiky shape to 'kiki' and a round one to 'bouba' - a cross-cultural effect that shows up even in toddlers. New work also finds a rolled 'r' maps to jagged lines worldwide. Sounds are not fully arbitrary!

www.patreon.com/posts/147406... Android needs a bit more time in the oven and we're going to try and get it out by the 14th

Welcome to December's What's new with Lingonaut! Android Alpha and New Website for the New Year! WNWL 8 lingonaut.app/blog/android... We cover: The new site The new meet the crew page The android alpha Early sign-ups for patrons Moving on from wordpress Creatonaut Improvements More!

TIL Sound systems range from tiny to huge! Rotokas has about 11 phonemes - 6 consonants and 5 vowels. Taa ǃXóõ on the other hand has dozens of click series and analyses with 80+ consonants, with some counts topping 100!

www.patreon.com/posts/new-si... New site and Android signups for Patrons open! If you're a patron please head to lingonaut.app/patreon and enter the email you use for patreon so we'll be able to send out keys when they're ready. If you're not already, nows the chance to pledge and secure a spot!

TIL Zulu and Xhosa use clicks because of contact, not inheritance, their Bantu ancestors had none! They borrowed clicks from Khoisan neighbours and that spread into native words too. Both languages have three basic click types: written 'c' 'q' 'x' ! Xhosa is described as having 36 click consonants.

TIL Some languages have a 'mother-in-law register', in Dyirbal you switch to a special vocabulary whenever taboo in-laws are within earshot. The grammar stays the same but almost all content words change. E.g: ring-tail possum is usually called 'midin' - but 'jibuny' near MILs.

You wanted a roadmap, we give you a roadmap! we've un-retired the domain and now have a slick new way for you to catch up on what's what month-by month! You can also see the timeline of the project from its inception in late 2023 all the way up to now! roadmap.lingonaut.app

TIL Maltese is a Semitic language that developed from Arabic! It’s the only form of Arabic written in the Latin alphabet and has strong Sicilian influence. It’s also the only Semitic official language of the EU.

TIL English 'they - them - their' are Scandinavian loans. Old English used 'hie - him - heora'. After contact in the Danelaw, Norse 'þeir - þeim - þeirra' spread and displaced the native set - likely because it avoided clashes with 'he - him - her' as those forms converged!

Lingonaut Build 36 Update is live! More beta places are out as of right now! Sign up at lingonaut.app/beta

Welcome to November's What's new with Lingonaut! -Translatonauts, Tablets and Thanksgiving!- This month is a real great read and I tried shortening it for your reading pleasure, and you can find it here: lingonaut.app/translatonau...

Negative concord is normal in many languages! It’s only standard English (+ a few others) that ban it. Spanish - ‘no vi a nadie’ and Italian ‘non ho vista nessuno’ both mean ‘I saw nobody’. and it’s not a double negative! Even some English dialects allow it too :D

🇩🇪German course update 27/11/25🇩🇪 Added lots of new lessons Added images to all the skills and their notes Revised and reformatted guides Added text to speech for all the questions (preparing for real speech soon!) Tons of new content! Credits: WrenMala08, Fuchsteufel, Adrian7 , ElMago, pilvi#2140

Some languages build ‘two’ into grammar! Slovene has dual pronouns and verb forms: ‘midva greva’ - we two vs ‘mi gremo’ - we go. Arabic marks duality on nouns and agreement: ‘kitāb’ - book vs ‘kitābān’ - 2 books (gen/acc: kitābayn) English used to have them too but I've ran out of space so byeee

Our Creatonaut Course creator has had a massive update! This change adds lots and fixes lots in preparation for the next language we're adding. We're basically at the point where Creatonaut is more is less complete! It's free and anyone can use it at creatonaut.lingonaut.app Changelog below \|/

Many languages split ‘we’ into two, inclusive and exclusive. Inclusive ‘we’ includes the listener while exclusive ‘we’ doesn’t! 
 Tagalog: tayo vs kami
Tok Pisin: yumi vs mipela Fijian: keda vs keimami Quechua: ñuaanchik vs ñuggyku English only has one we though! weeee

Just a reminder that if you like what we do repost and tell your friends :)

TIL: Finnish has no separate future tense. The present covers future time. ‘Huomenna sataa’ - literally ‘tomorrow it rains’ which means it will rain tomorrow. Speakers add time words or modals when needed and the pattern is common cross-linguistically!

Lingonaut Build 31 'Tock' Update This change is focused on fixing bugs, improving quality of life and compatibility as well as bringing the course engine in line with Creatonaut 3.4! We've also added additional places to the beta, join while there's space! lingonaut.app/beta

TIL ‘Robot’ is Czech! Karel Capek’s R.U.R. (1920) introduced it, from ‘robota’ meaning ‘forced labour’. His brother Josef coined the word. In the play the robots are lab-made biological workers rather than metal machines, that idea came later.

Some languages don’t have exact words for exact numbers. Piraha in the Amazon uses words roughly meaning ‘small quantity’ and ‘larger quantity’ instead of ‘1' and '2’, and experiments found that speakers approximate amounts but struggle with exact quantities once sets get bigger or go out of sight!

TIL Spanish ‘ñ’ began as shorthand for ‘nn’, kinda like ß being ss in German! Medieval scribes wrote an ’n’ with a small wavy line above it (the tilde) and ‘anno’ became ‘año’. The shorthand later became a distinct letter in Spanish and spread to Galician and Basque too.

TIL Many languages don’t use the verb ‘have’! Instead of ‘I have a book’ they would say ‘at me is a book’. Russian: u menya est’ king. Irish: tá leabhar agam. Hebrew: yesh li sefer. They combine the verb for ‘to be’ with an adposition!

Hindu and Urdu are one spoken language, Hindustani! They’re split apart by script and prestige vocabulary. Hindi uses Devanagari and more Sanskrit loans while Urdu uses Nastaliq and more Persian/Arabic loans. Colloquial speech is mostly mutually intelligible though!

Now is the time to flex that pledge! (Or if you don't have one yet, to grab one!) Should we go with the Android client next or the Web client? You decide! www.patreon.com/posts/142398... Thank you to our patrons for helping keep lingonaut free for everyone!

lingonaut.app/stability-we... Another monthly roundup of our progress!

Sick of the energy update? lingonaut.app, has infinite energy, infinite hearts and is made with infinite heart ❤️ Free for everyone, no paywalls, no mtx and no AI. Join the beta now! lingonaut.app/beta

Icelanders don't really use family surnames! Names are patronymic or matronymic, Jon Einarsson's daughter is Anna Jondottir and his son would be Olafur Jonnson! People are listed and addressed by their first name, and a state Naming Committee approves new given names.

TIL That Korean Hangul was designed, not naturally evolved. In 1443 King Sejong’s scholars made an alphabet where consonants mirror your mouth and tongue, and vowels combine three marks for heaven, earth, human. It was published in 1446 and was built to be easy to learn!

AI-First has always been the same as People-Last

English ‘I’ wasn’t always capital. Old English used ‘ic’. When it shrank to a single ‘i’ in Middle English, scribes wrote it as a capital ‘I’ so the letter wouldn’t get lost in manuscripts, not because the self is special!

We don’t trust mass produced AI generated language learning slop and you shouldn’t either. It’s concerning to see them pop up by the dozen on #langsky overnight by people looking to make a quick buck. Easier to just learn what’s correct in the first place!

‘Huh?’ is near-universal. Across unrelated languages, people use almost the same little word to request a quick repeat. It isn’t innate though, likely convergent evolution under the pressure to get the conversation back on track.

English has one 'blue.' Russian splits it into two basic colors: siniy (dark blue) and goluboy (light blue). Experiments show Russian speakers are faster at telling apart blues that cross this boundary, a power that weakens when verbal rehearsal is blocked!

TIL You can whistle a language! On La Gomera (one of the Canary Islands), Silbo Gomero encodes Spanish into whistles that carry across valleys for kilometres! It’s taught in schools since 1999 and considered a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO