Videos

Dutch is full of loan words, such as "last minute" or "lunch". It seems as if it can borrow English words without any limit. But is that really the case? Linguist Marlieke Shaw (KU Leuven - FWO) looks into this by studying transcriptions of spoken texts. A real must-see for fans of the Dutch language.

Aproved"* reads a Royal Decree that was possibly signed by Cleopatra (or at least by one of her ministers). But how did such a spelling error get into such an important document? Couldn't Cleopatra and her ministers spell? That's what classicist Geert De Mol (Ghent University) is looking into in his PhD.

The disappearance of forests is nothing less than "a genocide of trees, with bleeding stumps and amputated branches. With this powerful imagery, the French writer Pierre Gascar already sounded the alarm about the environment 50 years ago. Sara Buekens studies how he and his colleagues wanted to put environmental issues on the agenda in their novels half a century ago. Are you ready for an ecological novel?

"You're a bad teacher and your class is absolute bullsh*t!". Novice teachers often do not know how to deal with this type of verbal-aggressive behavior, partly because it is not yet sufficiently addressed in their training. To tackle this, Delphine Franco is working on a solution.

Did you know that there are about 7,000 languages in the world? And that more than 2,600 of these languages are in danger of extinction? With every language that disappears, we lose a unique part of the rich diversity that exists in human languages. That's why Dana Louagie studies Aboriginal languages.