the.com/tongues
the only muscle anchored at just one end, picking fights and tasting victory.
means The plural of tongue — the muscular organs in our mouths used for tasting and talking, or by extension the languages people speak.
from From Old English 'tunge,' the word for both the fleshy organ and speech itself — a doubling of meaning that goes back to Proto-Germanic '*tungōn' and is a cousin of Latin 'lingua' (which gave us 'language' and 'linguistics'). The shared ancestor is reconstructed as something like '*dnghū-,' and that wandering 'd' is why Latin's 'lingua' looks oddly unlike its English relative. The sense of 'a language' — as in speaking in tongues — is ancient too, riding along with the organ from the very start.
- map fiction
- The taste-zone tongue map is debunked junk science
- unique print
- Tongue prints are as individual as fingerprints
- healing speed
- It mends faster than any other body tissue
- strongest claim
- Strong for its size, not the body's strongest
- taste buds
- Most live elsewhere; bumps you see aren't them
tower of babel — biblical site in ancient mesopotamia where god confused human languages according to genesis 11
rosetta stone — artifact from 196 bce egypt with text in hieroglyphic, demotic, and greek that unlocked ancient language translation
esperanto — constructed language created by l.l. zamenhof in 1887 to promote peace through linguistic unity
sign language — visual communication system used by deaf communities worldwide, with distinct versions like asl and bsl