Hapax Legomenon

A hapax legomenon is a word that occurs only once in a given body of text:

  • NORTELRYE (“education”) was used only by Chaucer, and only once.
  • AUTOGUOS, an ancient Greek word for “plow,” was used only once, in Hesiod.
  • FLOTHER, a charming synonym for “snowflake,” appears only once in written English before 1900 (in a manuscript from around 1275).
  • PIM, a stone weight of about a quarter ounce, appears only once in Biblical Hebrew (1 Samuel 13:20).

HONORIFICABILITUDINITATIBUS appears only once in Shakespeare’s works (in Love’s Labour’s Lost). Probably a good thing.

| Language

Rongorongo

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Moai_Rano_raraku.jpg

Statues aren’t the only mystery on Easter Island. Tablets found on the island bear a mysterious script, known as rongorongo, that has never been successfully deciphered.

Some scholars have pointed out similarities between the strange characters and the prehistoric script of the Indus Valley in India, 6,000 miles away, but others dispute this.

The islanders themselves give eager and varying accounts to archaeologists and historians, and perhaps they themselves don’t know. Some say that rongorongo means peace-peace, and that the documents record treaties, perhaps with visitors to the island.

So far, none of the attempts at translation have withstood peer review.

| Language · Oddities

“An Orthographic Lament”

If an S and an I and an O and a U
With an X at the end spell Su;
And an E and a Y and an E spell I,
Pray what is a speller to do?

Then, if also an S and an I and a G
And an HED spell side,
There’s nothing much left for a speller to do
But to go and commit siouxeyesighed.

— Charles Follen Adams

| Humor · Language · Poems