# Where words come from.

Latin and Slavic, Greek and Persian, river names and proverbs. Each work follows one word from its origin to your mouth.

## Start here

- [Eight in Ten](https://mariuscomper.uk/opt-din-zece/en/) — A map of Romania made of 18,214 settlement points and 127 rivers, on which the name strata are laid down in turn: ancient, Slavic, Turkic, Hungarian, German, Romanian. A time slider, a length ranking of rivers and a core sample for any name.

## Masterpieces

Six works chosen for visual power, depth and finish: maps, atlases and stories showing everything this page can do.

- [What language do you pray in, when you pray in Romanian?](https://mariuscomper.uk/liturghia-poliglota/en/) — A Romanian service speaks four languages at once: Latin, Greek arrived via Slavonic, Slavic, and Hebrew arrived via Greek and Slavonic. Thirteen words with dictionary passports, a service to hear, and a game to solve.
- [The serf named Roman: how the Romanians' name came to mean serf — and back](https://mariuscomper.uk/rumanul-rob/en/) — Romanus becomes rumân: an ethnic name and, in Wallachia, a social term for the dependent peasant. The ethnonym, the social status and the spelling — three parallel histories, with the 1613 deed and the 1746/1749 and 1864 thresholds. With the three-track Name Engine, the 100–1900 year finder and the “Serf or Roman?” quiz.
- [Our cheese ended up as Slovakia's national dish](https://mariuscomper.uk/branza-calatoare/en/) — How Vlach shepherds carried three Romanian words over the Carpathians: brânză, turned bryndza in halušky, baci, the head shepherd from Poland to Moravia, and urdă, with five etymologies and no winner. Three dated attestations, six dishes, sheep climbing to 2,000 metres.
- [How a Serbian village word became your vampire](https://mariuscomper.uk/strigoi-vs-vampir/en/) — Strigoi inherits Latin through striga, while vampire is a Slavic word of disputed origin that crossed Europe inside the Austrian reports on the 1725 and 1732 exhumations and through the European press, returning to Romanian as a French and German neologism. A five-chapter map, side-by-side definitions and an eight-quotation quiz.
- [I, Zenovius, set up this gift](https://mariuscomper.uk/donariul-din-biertan/en/) — The Biertan donarium: a 4th-century bronze tablet found in 1775 near Biertan, Romania, inscribed EGO ZENOVIVS VOTVM POSVI. Four Latin words, two of which still live in Romanian.
- [Six words carved into a cliff above the Danube that a Romanian can half-read](https://mariuscomper.uk/tabula-traiana/en/) — The last sentence on the Tabula Traiana, word by word: two survived into Romanian, two shifted, two vanished. Then the dam came.

## Selected

- [No one knew what language these signs hid. How do you read them anyway?](https://mariuscomper.uk/alice-kober-linear-b/en/) — The clay tablets of Knossos held not one known word. Alice Kober, who taught at Brooklyn College, showed how their signs were related without knowing their sounds; in 1952 Michael Ventris got Greek out of the grid, though he had once called it a fantasy. Solve the three town names that opened Linear B.
- [The Proverb Gallows: guess the old saying](https://mariuscomper.uk/spanzuratoarea/en/) — Classic hangman: 40 Romanian proverbs in the Romanian edition and 40 English ones in the English edition. Six wrong guesses, then the meaning is revealed.
- [Hear the Difference: A Romanian Perception Pilot — Six Contrasts](https://mariuscomper.uk/auzi-diferenta/) — Six Romanian contrasts for Chinese-speaking learners: letters, IPA and articulation (no audio), plus the perception-training paradigm and method. The test ships after validated recordings.
- [Where Blue Ends](https://albastru.mariuscomper.uk/en/) — The same palette, divided by 110 languages.
- [Two Notes in the Mouth](https://mariuscomper.uk/doua-note/en/) — Vocal folds produce only a raw drone: what we hear as speech is a chord of two frequencies. In “i”, the gap spans over 3 octaves; from “u” to “i”, the second frequency triples; and Romanian anchors two central vowels along the midline.
- [The Finger Journey · How Far Your Hands Travel in Romanian](https://mariuscomper.uk/drumul-degetelor/en/) — The biomechanical cost of typing in Romanian: 1.38 kilometers traveled by fingers for every 10,000 words, and a 57% workload asymmetry on the left hand.

## Themes

Each shelf shows the theme's four finest works, hand-picked. Open any shelf to see the full list in the library.

### The story of words

Etymologies with dictionary passports: where they come from and how they changed.

- [You eat Latin every day](https://mariuscomper.uk/masa-latina/en/) — Masă, pâine, sare, vin, lingură: six Latin inheritances on the Romanian table, three newcomers and the Roman receipt of AD 301. With the table that sets itself, the etymological chains and the claims table.
- [How the dragon became the devil: the story of the Romanian word drac](https://mariuscomper.uk/dracu/en/) — In Latin, draco meant dragon. In Romanian, drac means devil. The shift happened in Christian Latin, and Romanian is the only major Romance language in which the new sense erased the old one. The same word produced Dracul and Draculea.
- [Your plate used to be an emperor of China](https://mariuscomper.uk/faghfur/en/) — How a Chinese imperial title landed on your table: «Son of Heaven» became βaγpūr in Sogdian, faghfur in Persian, fağfurî for the Ottomans and farfurie in Romanian. With the map of the two roads — of the word and of the vessels —, Harun's gift, the Topkapi treasure, a riddle and a quiz.
- [The broken bench: your bank is a bench](https://mariuscomper.uk/banca-sparta/en/) — The money-changer's banca was a real bench, and bancruta is that bench broken: Italian banca rotta. Six dated European forms, from 9th-century Germanic banc to 18th-century Romanian bancă, an ordering game, and the smashing legend dictionaries file as pseudo-etymology.

[See all 62](https://mariuscomper.uk/en/projects/?subject=language&format=articles)

### Word maps

River, people and village names, put on a map.

- [Eight in Ten](https://mariuscomper.uk/opt-din-zece/en/) — A map of Romania made of 18,214 settlement points and 127 rivers, on which the name strata are laid down in turn: ancient, Slavic, Turkic, Hungarian, German, Romanian. A time slider, a length ranking of rivers and a core sample for any name.
- [Atlas of Names](https://mariuscomper.uk/atlasul-numelor/en/) — 8,560 Romanian given names and surnames from Wiktionary, with 19 extended explanations. Search a name and trace, step by step, which words it formed from — from Ioan to Ionescu, through Church Slavonic and Greek.
- [The Latin Island: the Romanian language, from Dacia to Weigand](https://mariuscomper.uk/limba-romana/en/) — Dacia 106, the 587 shout, Neacșu 1521, Vienna 1780. A Romance language 1,137 km from Rome.
- [One paragraph, 21 British voices](https://mariuscomper.uk/accent-atlas/en/) — 21 speakers across Britain read the same paragraph: pick a town and watch six words change shape in phonetic transcription.

[See all 20](https://mariuscomper.uk/en/projects/?subject=language&format=atlases)

### Word games

Decipher, guess, tell apart: language as a game.

- [No one knew what language these signs hid. How do you read them anyway?](https://mariuscomper.uk/alice-kober-linear-b/en/) — The clay tablets of Knossos held not one known word. Alice Kober, who taught at Brooklyn College, showed how their signs were related without knowing their sounds; in 1952 Michael Ventris got Greek out of the grid, though he had once called it a fantasy. Solve the three town names that opened Linear B.
- [The Proverb Gallows: guess the old saying](https://mariuscomper.uk/spanzuratoarea/en/) — Classic hangman: 40 Romanian proverbs in the Romanian edition and 40 English ones in the English edition. Six wrong guesses, then the meaning is revealed.
- [Hear the Difference: A Romanian Perception Pilot — Six Contrasts](https://mariuscomper.uk/auzi-diferenta/) — Six Romanian contrasts for Chinese-speaking learners: letters, IPA and articulation (no audio), plus the perception-training paradigm and method. The test ships after validated recordings.
- [The Last Copy](https://mariuscomper.uk/ultima-copie/en/) — Of the 799 medieval chivalric works that have reached us, 326 are attested by a single manuscript.

[See all 6](https://mariuscomper.uk/en/projects/?subject=language&format=games)

### Word machines

The life, value and journey of words, calculated.

- [The Half-Life of Words](https://mariuscomper.uk/jumatatea-de-viata/en/) — Words used 100 times more frequently evolve 10 times more slowly. Follow the decay of vocabulary and verbs, century by century.
- [What is 1.234 worth? One mark can change the value 1,000-fold](https://mariuscomper.uk/o-mie-de-ori/en/) — The same numeric string can mean 1,234 or 1.234, depending on its locale convention. Compare 22 Unicode CLDR profiles.
- [Two Notes in the Mouth](https://mariuscomper.uk/doua-note/en/) — Vocal folds produce only a raw drone: what we hear as speech is a chord of two frequencies. In “i”, the gap spans over 3 octaves; from “u” to “i”, the second frequency triples; and Romanian anchors two central vowels along the midline.
- [The Finger Journey · How Far Your Hands Travel in Romanian](https://mariuscomper.uk/drumul-degetelor/en/) — The biomechanical cost of typing in Romanian: 1.38 kilometers traveled by fingers for every 10,000 words, and a 57% workload asymmetry on the left hand.

[See all 5](https://mariuscomper.uk/en/projects/?subject=language&format=models)

### Romanian in documents

Deeds, letters, primers and dictionaries: the language on paper.

- [6 February AD 131: what we can still read after 1,895 years](https://mariuscomper.uk/actul-din-131/en/) — Five surviving lines, a Roman date and the name Alburnus Maior: what the wax tablet written on 6 February 131 really tells us.
- [The book every Romanian touched](https://mariuscomper.uk/abecedarul/en/) — 41 years, one book on every desk — and three books before it.
- [The first Romanian sentence was a spy alert: Neacșu's letter (1521)](https://mariuscomper.uk/scrisoarea-lui-neacsu/en/) — The oldest precisely dated Romanian text is a spy warning from Câmpulung to Brașov. Read it phrase by phrase, with renderings.
- [The Academy Dictionary, 1871–1877: the war for words](https://mariuscomper.uk/dictionarul-academiei/en/) — Laurian and Massim tried to erase every non-Latin word from Romanian. Dragoste lived, cespete died — one sentence, two languages, nine verdicts.

[See all 8](https://mariuscomper.uk/en/projects/?subject=language&topic=romania)

### Words and culture

Printers, proverbs and languages with no common ancestor.

- [Deacon Coresi: the deacon who printed a language (1557–1583)](https://mariuscomper.uk/coresi-diaconul/en/) — Deacon Coresi's Brașov press (1557–1583) put Romanian into print: the shop, the ten Romanian books with BRV numbers, and the shelves where the surviving copies sit today, shelfmark by shelfmark.
- [The bread is Latin, the plow is Slavic](https://mariuscomper.uk/painea-si-plugul/en/) — Romanian's basic food words trace to Latin. The heavy medieval wheeled plow's parts are mostly Slavic or Hungarian. An interactive diagram shows where the farming vocabulary splits.
- [Five Languages, Three Patterns, No Common Ancestor](https://mariuscomper.uk/zero-stramosi/en/) — Romanian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek and Aromanian build their future tense with the same grammatical mechanism, from a verb meaning to want, despite coming from four unrelated language families. An interactive map of the Balkan sprachbund, exceptions included.
- [Everyone Is a Relative](https://mariuscomper.uk/toata-lumea-e-ruda/en/) — Cuscru, fin, cumătru: relatives named in Romanian and nameless in English. The elder brother, the maternal uncle: nameless in Romanian, named in 70% of the world's languages. Ten rules of the kinship vocabulary, on a map of 1,056 languages.

[See all 13](https://mariuscomper.uk/en/projects/?subject=language&topic=culture)

## Approaches

The numbers show how many works about words each approach holds.

- [Articles & explanations (62)](https://mariuscomper.uk/en/projects/?subject=language&format=articles)
- [Maps & data atlases (20)](https://mariuscomper.uk/en/projects/?subject=language&format=atlases)
- [Games & tests (6)](https://mariuscomper.uk/en/projects/?subject=language&format=games)
- [Simulations & models (5)](https://mariuscomper.uk/en/projects/?subject=language&format=models)
- [Investigations & audits (3)](https://mariuscomper.uk/en/projects/?subject=language&format=investigations)
- [Guides & tools (3)](https://mariuscomper.uk/en/projects/?subject=language&format=guides)

## All 99 works, newest first.

- [How did the northern sea come to be called black?](https://mariuscomper.uk/marea-neagra-nordului/en/) — Turkish kara means black and, archaically, north — so Kara Deniz is a compass point. The Greeks turned Axeinos into Euxeinos. A word-journey from Histria (~630 BC) to the Romanian shore (1878).
- [London, in thirty-three parts](https://mariuscomper.uk/london-boroughs/) — Ride a fictional Tube line through all 32 boroughs and the City: what each name meant in Old English, who built it, and the oddities it keeps — from Croydon's Mayday to Stamford Bridge being in Fulham.
- [Where do the names Transylvania, Erdély, Ardeal and Siebenbürgen come from?](https://mariuscomper.uk/ardealul-trei-nume/en/) — Where do Transylvania, Erdély, Ardeal and Siebenbürgen come from? A documented chronology of the region’s names, with sources, hypotheses and their limits.
- [Why do you live by the calendar of a dead dictator and a dead emperor?](https://mariuscomper.uk/lunile-dictatori/en/) — July comes from Julius Caesar, August from Augustus — one dictator, one emperor. The gods, the rite, the lying numbers and the failed renames behind the 12 months — with the Year Machine, from Romulus to today.
- [Why are you still counting in Latin?](https://mariuscomper.uk/numaram-latina/en/) — Type OCTO, get OPT: eleven numerals inherited from Latin, six sound laws you can turn off and on, one intruder, and three ways of writing a number, from wax tablets to comma-below ș.
- [What language do you pray in, when you pray in Romanian?](https://mariuscomper.uk/liturghia-poliglota/en/) — A Romanian service speaks four languages at once: Latin, Greek arrived via Slavonic, Slavic, and Hebrew arrived via Greek and Slavonic. Thirteen words with dictionary passports, a service to hear, and a game to solve.
- [How did a country end up named after a man? Moldova, Bogdan, Eflak](https://mariuscomper.uk/moldova-bogdan/en/) — An unexplained river-name, a 14th-century founder, and the Ottoman pair Eflak ve Bogdan: two voices of one land, from 1359 to 1859 — with dated documents.
- [Why does the peasant carry the country's name: țara from terra, pământ from pavimentum](https://mariuscomper.uk/tara-pamant/en/) — Țara grew out of soil (Latin terra) while pământ sank out of a beaten floor (Latin pavimentum): two crossed words, three dates — 1521, 1848, 1926 — and the Ladder of Senses.
- [How many empires fit in the market where you buy your bread?](https://mariuscomper.uk/piata-targ-bazar/en/) — Why the same place is piață, târg, iarmaroc and bazar at once: seven words, four empires, three dates — with the dictionaries on the table and a game at the end.
- [Why is your small change named after a Croatian viceroy?](https://mariuscomper.uk/banul-croat/en/) — The dictionary says the ban's origin is unknown. The coins say otherwise: the Croatian marten banovac (~1260), Vlaicu's ban (1365) and the 1867 law.
- [Why do Romanians call Germans “the mute ones”?](https://mariuscomper.uk/neamtul-mut/en/) — The Slavs could not understand their Germanic neighbours, so they called them “the mutes”, and Romanian kept the word to this day. The story of němьcь, the barbaros–walhaz mirror, and the witnesses from Jordanes to the Transylvanian Saxons.
- [Why Romanian calls a church biserică](https://mariuscomper.uk/biserica-basilica/en/) — Romanian biserică descends from Latin basilica — but the word's history and the building's history run on different tracks. With the Word/Building visual, plans that actually change, and a quiz.
- [Why does your week worship five dead gods?](https://mariuscomper.uk/saptamana-planete/en/) — Luni comes from the Moon, marți from Mars, miercuri from Mercury, joi from Jupiter, vineri from Venus. Why the gods stand scrambled, why Saturday kept the Sabbath, and who renamed Sunday.
- [John's Fairies: why the June fairies answer to the Baptist's name](https://mariuscomper.uk/sanzienele-ion/en/) — From SANCTUS DIES JOHANNIS, Saint John's day, to the Sânziene: the Sân- wheel with four saints (Sânziene, Sânpetru, Sântilie, Sâmedru), the three living senses — feast, flower, fairies — and the night of 23 June with bonfires, wreaths on water and the Drăgaica fair. With the etymology chain, the wheel-walk and quotes from DEX, MDA2, Șăineanu and Scriban.
- [You eat Latin every day](https://mariuscomper.uk/masa-latina/en/) — Masă, pâine, sare, vin, lingură: six Latin inheritances on the Romanian table, three newcomers and the Roman receipt of AD 301. With the table that sets itself, the etymological chains and the claims table.
- [Rusalii: how roses came to name the Holy Ghost and the fairies](https://mariuscomper.uk/rusaliile-trandafiri/en/) — From ROSALIA, the Roman rose-feast on graves, to Rusalii: the debatable Slavic route, the three living senses — feast, fairy, mayfly — and the week between worlds, with the Saturday of the dead, walnut-branch Sunday, the healing călușari (UNESCO 2008) and the water rusalkas. With the ROSALIA→RUSALII etymology chain, the week-walk and quotes from DEX, DER, Șăineanu and Scriban.
- [Moș Crăciun without parents: two words, zero certain origins](https://mariuscomper.uk/mos-craciun-fara-parinti/en/) — Neither moș nor Crăciun has a known origin: DEX shrugs, and the etymological dictionary lines up 18 suspects and convicts none. A cold-case file with the interactive suspect board, word/status/language-family filters, birth certificates stamped UNKNOWN and quotes from DEX, DER and Scriban.
- [The serf named Roman: how the Romanians' name came to mean serf — and back](https://mariuscomper.uk/rumanul-rob/en/) — Romanus becomes rumân: an ethnic name and, in Wallachia, a social term for the dependent peasant. The ethnonym, the social status and the spelling — three parallel histories, with the 1613 deed and the 1746/1749 and 1864 thresholds. With the three-track Name Engine, the 100–1900 year finder and the “Serf or Roman?” quiz.
- [The Welsh are the Wallachians of Britain: one word named them both](https://mariuscomper.uk/valahul-galez/en/) — A reconstructed word — *walhaz, “the foreigner, the Roman” — named Wales, the Walloons, the Vlachs, the Oláh, Eflak and Wallachia: the story of the name, with the first Byzantine sightings, the 1185 revolt and the last valley still called Wallachia. With the sightings atlas that lights up as you scrub it, ten exonyms on the map and the word morphing across languages.
- [One word walked here from Persia](https://mariuscomper.uk/ciobanul-persan/en/) — Cioban is Persian čupân, keeper of flocks, arrived via Turkish çoban and kept as the everyday word beside Latin-derived păstor and regional păcurar; three millennia of road from Persia to the sheepfold, with attestations and a living map. With the road that draws itself, the stop finder and a quiz.
- [You say noroc. You're passing a Slavic sentence.](https://mariuscomper.uk/noroc-narok/en/) — Noroc is Slavic narok, "that which was spoken", softened into good luck and then into the toast itself; the clinked glass runs from Greek libations to Prost, Şerefe and cin cin. With an atlas of the world's toasts and a quiz.
- [Bogdaproste or bodaproste? Meaning and origin of the Romanian alms-thanks](https://mariuscomper.uk/bogdaproste/en/) — Bogdaproste is the thanks said when receiving pomana, memorial alms for the dead, from Bulg. «bog da prosti», «May God forgive»; DOOM3 moved the headword to bodaproste. Meaning, norm, stress, the 1746 attestation, today's Bulgarian formula, and a receipt engine with two scenes — Rome and the pomana.
- [The village was once a ditch](https://mariuscomper.uk/satul-fossatum/en/) — The word “sat” comes from Latin fossatum, “ditch” — but the road to “settlement” is reconstructed, not a birth certificate. With old fsat, the fortress that used to be a city, the city-word from Hungarian and the French twin fossé: an excavation in three words, documents in view.
- [Your plate used to be an emperor of China](https://mariuscomper.uk/faghfur/en/) — How a Chinese imperial title landed on your table: «Son of Heaven» became βaγpūr in Sogdian, faghfur in Persian, fağfurî for the Ottomans and farfurie in Romanian. With the map of the two roads — of the word and of the vessels —, Harun's gift, the Topkapi treasure, a riddle and a quiz.
- [From χορός to horă: nearly three millennia around a circle](https://mariuscomper.uk/hora-lui-choros/en/) — Three histories meeting in the hora — the word, the circle, the symbol — from choros on Achilles' shield through the Balkans, Hora Unirii and the horah, to 1989. With the three-thread wheel, six chapters and a quiz.
- [Your rachiu is an Arabic word](https://mariuscomper.uk/rachiul-arab/en/) — Rachiu comes from Turkish rakı — possibly via Serbian rakija —, from Arabic ʿaraq — sweat —: eight documented stops, from the 1688 Bible to Batavian arrack, a flying map, a form finder and a game about words and drinks.
- [How a Serbian village word became your vampire](https://mariuscomper.uk/strigoi-vs-vampir/en/) — Strigoi inherits Latin through striga, while vampire is a Slavic word of disputed origin that crossed Europe inside the Austrian reports on the 1725 and 1732 exhumations and through the European press, returning to Romanian as a French and German neologism. A five-chapter map, side-by-side definitions and an eight-quotation quiz.
- [Survival Romanian: the pinyin bridge and 120 phrases](https://mariuscomper.uk/romana-supravietuire/en/) — 120 Romanian phrases for Chinese speakers, each with a pinyin bridge and an honest fence where the bridge breaks. Station, restaurant, pharmacy, emergencies — plus the red quiz that won't let you cheat.
- [The only Roman map of Banat strings eleven stations in a row. Not one still goes by its name.](https://mariuscomper.uk/peutingeriana-dacia/en/) — The Tabula Peutingeriana, the 1265 copy of the Empire's road map, preserves the only ancient road network of Dacia. Eleven names from the Danube to Sarmizegetusa, taken one by one: none survived untouched.
- [How long is a step? A metre and a half, by the Roman standard](https://mariuscomper.uk/cat-e-un-pas/en/) — The Roman pace, the passus: five standard feet, ≈1.48 m. The body named the measure; the standard gave its length. At Aiton, the AD 108 stone stands ten miles from Potaissa; pas, milă and zece stayed in the language.
- [Five words on a Roman roof tile from Apulum](https://mariuscomper.uk/tigla-de-la-apulum/en/) — A roof tile stamped LEG XIII GEM in the Alba Iulia museum: the mark of Legio XIII Gemina. Five words traced into Romanian — one survived, two came back by another road, one was rebuilt, one vanished.
- [How do you count to ten on a Roman's fingers?](https://mariuscomper.uk/degetele-romanilor/en/) — The left hand counts to 99 and both hands together to 9,999, by the method Bede wrote down in 725. But a Roman would not recognize two of your five fingers.
- [How the dragon became the devil: the story of the Romanian word drac](https://mariuscomper.uk/dracu/en/) — In Latin, draco meant dragon. In Romanian, drac means devil. The shift happened in Christian Latin, and Romanian is the only major Romance language in which the new sense erased the old one. The same word produced Dracul and Draculea.
- [You say Easter. Most of Europe says pascha.](https://mariuscomper.uk/paste-pesach/en/) — Paște comes from Hebrew pesach, through Aramaic, Greek and Latin; the feast's date survived the Quartodeciman wars and Nicaea, and the hinge is a monk from Dobruja. With a working Easter computer and a quiz.
- [I, Zenovius, set up this gift](https://mariuscomper.uk/donariul-din-biertan/en/) — The Biertan donarium: a 4th-century bronze tablet found in 1775 near Biertan, Romania, inscribed EGO ZENOVIVS VOTVM POSVI. Four Latin words, two of which still live in Romanian.
- [How the villager became the heathen: paganus, from villager to unbeliever](https://mariuscomper.uk/paganul/en/) — Romanian păgân (heathen) comes from Latin paganus, 'villager': the DER evidence, the Romance cognates, the two theories of the change of sense, and the Christian layer from Latin.
- [Europe's first writing, dug out of a pit in Transylvania?](https://mariuscomper.uk/tablitele-tartaria/en/) — In 1961, three inscribed clay tablets came out of the ground at Tărtăria, Romania. Some call them the world's oldest writing, two millennia before Sumer. Others say the dating does not hold, the signs are no script, and the discovery story has holes.
- [When did churches start speaking Romanian?: Câmpulung, 1636](https://mariuscomper.uk/prima-pisanie-romana/en/) — For centuries, the story written on church walls was told in Church Slavonic. In the summer of 1636, on the freshly raised wall of the princely church in Câmpulung, the foundation story was written in Romanian. One of the first Romanian-language inscriptions.
- [6 February AD 131: what we can still read after 1,895 years](https://mariuscomper.uk/actul-din-131/en/) — Five surviving lines, a Roman date and the name Alburnus Maior: what the wax tablet written on 6 February 131 really tells us.
- [Why spy agencies, IQ tests and AI all use the same word](https://mariuscomper.uk/inteligenta/en/) — The history of the word intelligence: Latin intellegere, inherited in Romanian a înțelege and borrowed back from French; the angels that turned Dante's heavens; spies' secret news; Binet's tests, the g factor in Spearman's own table, eugenics and the Flynn effect; working memory, with a 2-back game; Turing's machines. And how other languages name the mind: waking, hearing, a camel's tether.
- [The Romanian verb for ‘to walk’ comes from the Latin for ‘to sink’](https://mariuscomper.uk/ce-insemnau-cuvintele/en/) — What 49 Romanian words first meant: the verb for caress (to clean), research (to go round), leave (to fold), earn (to punish), and the nouns for woman (the whole household), forest (marsh) and work (torment). Each with its dictionary source, reconstructed forms and disputed etymologies marked. Plus a guessing game and an index.
- [Every December, we sing a Roman date](https://mariuscomper.uk/colinda-calendae/en/) — Colindă comes from Latin calendae, via Slavic kolenda: a Roman 1 January date, banned by synods for centuries and still sung every December.
- [The broken bench: your bank is a bench](https://mariuscomper.uk/banca-sparta/en/) — The money-changer's banca was a real bench, and bancruta is that bench broken: Italian banca rotta. Six dated European forms, from 9th-century Germanic banc to 18th-century Romanian bancă, an ordering game, and the smashing legend dictionaries file as pseudo-etymology.
- [Our cheese ended up as Slovakia's national dish](https://mariuscomper.uk/branza-calatoare/en/) — How Vlach shepherds carried three Romanian words over the Carpathians: brânză, turned bryndza in halušky, baci, the head shepherd from Poland to Moravia, and urdă, with five etymologies and no winner. Three dated attestations, six dishes, sheep climbing to 2,000 metres.
- [A Pompeii brothel graffito that a Romanian can almost read](https://mariuscomper.uk/pompei-in-olteana/en/) — A line scratched on the wall of Pompeii's brothel, hic ego cum veni futui, taken word by word into Romanian: four words survived, one only looks alike, three were lost. How the Latin perfect became the Romanian simple past, and where people still say venii for what they did the same day.
- [Six words carved into a cliff above the Danube that a Romanian can half-read](https://mariuscomper.uk/tabula-traiana/en/) — The last sentence on the Tabula Traiana, word by word: two survived into Romanian, two shifted, two vanished. Then the dam came.
- [No one knew what language these signs hid. How do you read them anyway?](https://mariuscomper.uk/alice-kober-linear-b/en/) — The clay tablets of Knossos held not one known word. Alice Kober, who taught at Brooklyn College, showed how their signs were related without knowing their sounds; in 1952 Michael Ventris got Greek out of the grid, though he had once called it a fantasy. Solve the three town names that opened Linear B.
- [One paragraph, 21 British voices](https://mariuscomper.uk/accent-atlas/en/) — 21 speakers across Britain read the same paragraph: pick a town and watch six words change shape in phonetic transcription.
- [The book every Romanian touched](https://mariuscomper.uk/abecedarul/en/) — 41 years, one book on every desk — and three books before it.
- [Deacon Coresi: the deacon who printed a language (1557–1583)](https://mariuscomper.uk/coresi-diaconul/en/) — Deacon Coresi's Brașov press (1557–1583) put Romanian into print: the shop, the ten Romanian books with BRV numbers, and the shelves where the surviving copies sit today, shelfmark by shelfmark.
- [The Academy Dictionary, 1871–1877: the war for words](https://mariuscomper.uk/dictionarul-academiei/en/) — Laurian and Massim tried to erase every non-Latin word from Romanian. Dragoste lived, cespete died — one sentence, two languages, nine verdicts.
- [The longest locality name in Romania: the complete ranking](https://mariuscomper.uk/cel-mai-lung-nume-localitate-romania/en/) — Stațiunea Zoologică Marină Agigea has 30 letters — not Sâmbăta, with 27. The ranking of all 13,755 official names, the shortest names, and a search for any village or town.
- [When «rost» meant mouth — 19 words from the Scheian Psalter](https://mariuscomper.uk/psaltirea-scheiana/en/) — «Rost» once meant mouth, «codru» once meant mountain. 19 words from the Scheian Psalter, with their then-meaning, now-meaning and evidence on show.
- [The first Romanian sentence was a spy alert: Neacșu's letter (1521)](https://mariuscomper.uk/scrisoarea-lui-neacsu/en/) — The oldest precisely dated Romanian text is a spy warning from Câmpulung to Brașov. Read it phrase by phrase, with renderings.
- [The Latin Island: the Romanian language, from Dacia to Weigand](https://mariuscomper.uk/limba-romana/en/) — Dacia 106, the 587 shout, Neacșu 1521, Vienna 1780. A Romance language 1,137 km from Rome.
- [The Proverb Gallows: guess the old saying](https://mariuscomper.uk/spanzuratoarea/en/) — Classic hangman: 40 Romanian proverbs in the Romanian edition and 40 English ones in the English edition. Six wrong guesses, then the meaning is revealed.
- [Hear the Difference: A Romanian Perception Pilot — Six Contrasts](https://mariuscomper.uk/auzi-diferenta/) — Six Romanian contrasts for Chinese-speaking learners: letters, IPA and articulation (no audio), plus the perception-training paradigm and method. The test ships after validated recordings.
- [Atlas of Names](https://mariuscomper.uk/atlasul-numelor/en/) — 8,560 Romanian given names and surnames from Wiktionary, with 19 extended explanations. Search a name and trace, step by step, which words it formed from — from Ioan to Ionescu, through Church Slavonic and Greek.
- [How Antonia Ruppel explains Sanskrit](https://mariuscomper.uk/antonia-ruppel/en/) — Absolute constructions are expressions of time whose head noun has nothing temporal in it — “at the rising sun”, meaning “at sunrise”.
- [The Last Copy](https://mariuscomper.uk/ultima-copie/en/) — Of the 799 medieval chivalric works that have reached us, 326 are attested by a single manuscript.
- [Milk from lactem](https://mariuscomper.uk/lapte-din-lactem/en/) — A sound change does not depend on what a word means; it happens wherever the phonetic conditions are met. Twenty-four of them rebuild forty Romanian words out of Latin, one step at a time.
- [The bread is Latin, the plow is Slavic](https://mariuscomper.uk/painea-si-plugul/en/) — Romanian's basic food words trace to Latin. The heavy medieval wheeled plow's parts are mostly Slavic or Hungarian. An interactive diagram shows where the farming vocabulary splits.
- [The Name You Were Given](https://mariuscomper.uk/the-name-you-were-given/) — England and Wales baby-name registers, 1904–2025. Type any first name to see its exact rank and count trajectory — and how the 100 most popular names covered 73% of boys born in 1996 but only 43% in 2025.
- [Moscopole: the city that traded, taught and translated](https://mariuscomper.uk/moscopole/en/) — Moscopole (Moschopolis, today Voskopoja) was a major Aromanian-speaking commercial and educational centre in the 18th-century Ottoman Balkans. Trade, schooling and languages: the story of the city and its links with Romania.
- [Would you still give this name?](https://mariuscomper.uk/numele-asta-se-mai-da/en/) — Maria ranked No. 1 in every year from 2002 to 2022. Type a first name and a birth year to see whether you belong to a crowd or a memory.
- [A Little Coffee, a Cafezinho — the silent grammar of Romanian diminutives](https://mariuscomper.uk/cafeluta/en/) — A Romanian diminutive leaves the object of a request untouched and absorbs, instead, the conflict around it. The phonetics of smallness, its reverse into contempt, contraband-coffee history, and an eleven-culture comparative atlas, with a word-by-word dissectable simulator.
- [The Valley, the Slope, and the Mountain](https://mariuscomper.uk/valea-si-muntele/en/) — A map of the Bârsa basin with 102 places, each classified by toponymic root (German, Hungarian, Romanian, uncertain). A movable waterline between 300 and 1800 m shows how the roots split by elevation; the attestation years show which villages have a real year and which microtoponyms never had a founding act.
- [Eight in Ten](https://mariuscomper.uk/opt-din-zece/en/) — A map of Romania made of 18,214 settlement points and 127 rivers, on which the name strata are laid down in turn: ancient, Slavic, Turkic, Hungarian, German, Romanian. A time slider, a length ranking of rivers and a core sample for any name.
- [Five Languages, Three Patterns, No Common Ancestor](https://mariuscomper.uk/zero-stramosi/en/) — Romanian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek and Aromanian build their future tense with the same grammatical mechanism, from a verb meaning to want, despite coming from four unrelated language families. An interactive map of the Balkan sprachbund, exceptions included.
- [From me](https://mariuscomper.uk/de-la-mine/en/) — Marian 1886, counted. The patient is named. The speaker keeps the speech. God keeps the gift.
- [1900, in autumn. A calendar of undated sayings — Marius Comper](https://mariuscomper.uk/cat-incape-intr-o-vorba/en/) — One-eyed Pazvante, Prince Reed, a flea shod in iron. A journey through Romanian sayings that kept their characters and stories while muddling the calendar.
- [Everyone Is a Relative](https://mariuscomper.uk/toata-lumea-e-ruda/en/) — Cuscru, fin, cumătru: relatives named in Romanian and nameless in English. The elder brother, the maternal uncle: nameless in Romanian, named in 70% of the world's languages. Ten rules of the kinship vocabulary, on a map of 1,056 languages.
- [Why We Say "Dumneavoastră"](https://mariuscomper.uk/cincisprezece-din-doua-sute-sapte/en/) — "Dumneavoastră" is a noble title compressed into a word said every day. Only 15 of the world's 207 languages make more than one politeness distinction for "you" — an interactive map of all 207, plus the feudal etymology hiding inside the word.
- [The Same Mouth — How 32,000 Baby Name Spellings Collapsed Into 4,000 Sounds](https://mariuscomper.uk/aceeasi-gura/en/) — US birth records contain 31,904 distinct baby-name spellings in 2024, but a phonetic algorithm reduces them to 3,998 sounds. The interactive charts trace how the gap has widened since 1950.
- [Why we say “da”](https://mariuscomper.uk/de-ce-spunem-da/en/) — Romanian says da from Slavic (11,847 per million in writing, 14,212 in speech), while Italian, Spanish and French keep Latin sic.
- [What survives the cut | From 79 words to 29](https://mariuscomper.uk/dupa-taietura/en/) — Move through four edits of the same scene and watch a 79-word paragraph become a 29-word story.
- [The Half-Life of Words](https://mariuscomper.uk/jumatatea-de-viata/en/) — Words used 100 times more frequently evolve 10 times more slowly. Follow the decay of vocabulary and verbs, century by century.
- [Thirty-Nine Bits per Second](https://mariuscomper.uk/treizeci-si-noua-de-biti/en/) — While raw speech rates vary widely across cultures, the net information rate delivered to the brain converges everywhere to 39.15 bits per second.
- [Borrowed Clothes](https://mariuscomper.uk/hainele-imprumutate/en/) — Romanian's neuter gender has no shape of its own: masculine singular, feminine plural. 48 of 52 loanwords checked landed exactly there.
- [What is 1.234 worth? One mark can change the value 1,000-fold](https://mariuscomper.uk/o-mie-de-ori/en/) — The same numeric string can mean 1,234 or 1.234, depending on its locale convention. Compare 22 Unicode CLDR profiles.
- [Two Notes in the Mouth](https://mariuscomper.uk/doua-note/en/) — Vocal folds produce only a raw drone: what we hear as speech is a chord of two frequencies. In “i”, the gap spans over 3 octaves; from “u” to “i”, the second frequency triples; and Romanian anchors two central vowels along the midline.
- [The Finger Journey · How Far Your Hands Travel in Romanian](https://mariuscomper.uk/drumul-degetelor/en/) — The biomechanical cost of typing in Romanian: 1.38 kilometers traveled by fingers for every 10,000 words, and a 57% workload asymmetry on the left hand.
- [Eight syllables on an oak cross](https://mariuscomper.uk/opt-silabe/en/) — How an entire village chronicled a century in folk meter.
- [The breath of words](https://mariuscomper.uk/respiratia-cuvintelor/en/) — Almost a quarter of the occurrences in the CoRoLa list have two letters. Measure the word lengths in your own sentence.
- [Who gets into “we”?](https://mariuscomper.uk/cine-intra-in-noi/en/) — 63 of 68 languages mark both boundaries of “we”.
- [World Rhymes with Name](https://mariuscomper.uk/rima/en/) — Eighty-nine thousand rhymes, counted inside stanzas.
- [Five letters, one little finger](https://mariuscomper.uk/tastatura/en/) — What Romanian costs at the keyboard, keypress by keypress.
- [Tea Took Two Roads](https://mariuscomper.uk/harta-cuvintelor/en/) — One hundred and seven languages, one thousand and sixteen words.
- [Who Named Romania](https://mariuscomper.uk/numele-satelor/en/) — A toponymic atlas of the country, dot by dot.
- [The language that left no sentence](https://mariuscomper.uk/galatian/en/) — A secure language, a lost voice. Names and one witness from 386 make up the surviving archive.
- [A Cheese Is a Map](https://mariuscomper.uk/urda-harta/en/) — A map of names for a cheese made from whey, with milk technology and the routes of words in view.
- [After Shakespeare](https://after-shakespeare.mariuscomper.uk/) — 100 later titles traced back to the lines that helped name them.
- [The Layers of a Word](https://straturi.mariuscomper.uk/en/) — The same words change rank when you move from the dictionary to frequency.
- [The Hat on ă](https://caciula.mariuscomper.uk/en/) — A breve in Unicode, a point on banknotes: the same letter carries two different marks.
- [Where Blue Ends](https://albastru.mariuscomper.uk/en/) — The same palette, divided by 110 languages.
- [The Comma Below the S](https://virgula.mariuscomper.uk/en/) — The mistake fonts fix before you ever see it.
- [Seventeen Seas and Two Oxen](https://oinops.mariuscomper.uk/en/) — One word for seventeen seas and two oxen.
- [Tell Me About a Complicated Man](https://polytropos.mariuscomper.uk/en/) — One epithet, eleven different heroes.
- [Attention, One Language at a Time](https://mariuscomper.uk/atentia-limba-cu-limba/en/) — One hundred forms from 78 languages trace how attention becomes orientation, listening, care or availability to another person.

Updated: 2026-09-25