The Genius Logic of the NATO Phonetic Alphabet: How It Was Created & How It Works

in History, Language | September 16th, 2026

Most of us can rattle off the first few words-that-stand-for-letters of the NATO phonetic alphabet. Alfa, Bravo, and Charlie no doubt come right to mind, and depending on how many war movies you’ve seen, so may Delta, Echo, and Foxtrot. But how many of us would recognize Kilo, Mike, and Sierra? For that matter, how much do any of us know about how these particular words came to be used to spell out other words when communicating over walkie-talkies or other low-fidelity communication systems? In the video above for his YouTube channel RobWords, YouTuber Rob Watts explains the development of and logic behind the NATO phonetic alphabet, wasting no time in clarifying that it isn’t a phonetic alphabet, nor was it created by NATO.

What we actually have here, Watts says, is a “spelling alphabet,” and its story goes back to the invention of the telephone in the eighteen-seventies. “Early telephonists found that if ever they needed to spell something out, like someone’s name, one letter would get misheard as another.” The idea of expressing each letter with a common word starting with that letter arose naturally, though figuring out exactly which words to use took a lot more trial and error.

In the early nineteen-tens, Western Union published a spelling alphabet consisting mostly of the names of people and places: Adams, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Edward, and so on. By World War I, the British army had also implemented a rather more eccentric version, using words like Beer, Monkey, Nuts, Orange, Pip, and Yorker; by World War II, “every armed service in Britain and the U.S. had developed its own spelling alphabet.”

In light of the rapidly globalizing nature of human affairs, and not just the military kind, the need for a single universal spelling alphabet became pressing. It wasn’t until the establishment of the International Civil Aviation Organization, meant to oversee the skies in peacetime, that earnest work began on a revision of the U.S.-U.K. combined forces’ existing spelling alphabet, incorporating English words easily pronounceable by non-English speakers, while also being minimally confusable for one another. By 1956, ICAO finalized its list, which has remained the NATO phonetic alphabet (or, officially, the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet) we all know today — or we at least partially know. It may well be worth your time to memorize the rest, since you never know when you’ll have to keep your Papas and Quebecs straight.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Why Reading Egyptian Hieroglyphics Is Easier Than You Think

in Archaeology, History, Language | August 26th, 2026

We’ve featured Egyptologist Ilona Regulski here on Open Culture a few times before. Once, she explained how to read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs; another time, she told us what the Rosetta Stone actually says. It was, perhaps, inevitable that she would cross paths with Rob Watts, creator of the YouTube channel RobWords, whose videos we often post. When he made the journey to Berlin’s Neues Museum, and specifically to its Egyptian Museum, Regulski was the expert he sought out to tell him — and us — all about how hieroglyphs, literally “sacred carvings,” actually make words.

Faced with a stone chiseled full of hieroglyphs, where do we start? Ancient Egyptian texts are all read from top to bottom, but some go left to right, and others right to left. To know which way, Regulski says, we must first look for symbols with a clear front and back, such as those in human or animal shapes.

Some names are written in blocks, themselves read from top to bottom — unless they contain a sign referring to a god, which, of course, gets customarily elevated to the top. But even if we understand the exact order in which we should read a given string of hieroglyphs, the question remains: how do we actually do that reading?

Though many hieroglyphs do appear to be figurative, with their recognizable forms of birds, bugs, arms, legs, and such, only sometimes are they meant to represent what they look like. Regulski explains that some of these signs are letters, and can be pronounced in much the same way as our own alphabet. What looks like a mouth sounds like an r; a highly abstracted bread loaf, t; a horned viper, ph; an owl, m. There is, of course, more to it. Signs can be combined not just to indicate sound, but also to disambiguate meaning. As you may have noticed, hieroglyphic writing is also what Watts calls a “vowel-free zone.” Exactly which of those sounds go where is, like certain other unresolved aspects of hieroglyphs, a matter of ongoing expert inquiry. But Egyptologists, as seeing Regulski in action reminds us, are a dedicated bunch.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Where Did Europe’s Countries—and the United Kingdom—Get Their Names?

in History, Language | July 24th, 2026

The typical student traveling on a Eurail pass will stop in such lands as Österreich, Italia, Česko and Schweiz — also known as Suisse, Svizzera, and Svizra. If that student happens to hail from the English-speaking world, the names Austria, Italy, the Czech Republic (the recent movement for Czechia notwithstanding), and Switzerland will sound more familiar. But the question inevitably comes to mind while riding between one historically and culturally rich capital to another: where did all these countries get their names in English? How on Earth, for example, did Deutschland, known in certain other European languages as Allemagne, Alemania, or Alemanha, get to be called Germany?

Language YouTuber RobWords has an explanation. “To the Romans, it was the land of the Germani, their name for the weird people speaking gibberish languages to the east of the River Rhine,” he says in the video above, standing in a forest conveniently located in Germany itself.

They “also used the word alemanni to describe a confederation of Germanic people, and that’s where a load of other languages get their word for Germany too.” And the meaning of Deutschland? “Land of the Dutch,” that last actually being the descendant of an old Germanic word meaning ‘popular’ or ‘people’ ” — which, before that time, referred not simply to human beings, but the population who spoke the region’s widely understood “popular languages.”

Behind most every European country’s English name lies a story, if sometimes an ambiguous, contested, and controversial one. Most are also historically illuminating: take Belgium, once considered part of the Netherlands (home of the people we now call Dutch), whose name derives from a tribe, or confederation of tribes, known in Latin as the Belgae: a word “adopted by people living in the southern Low Countries during the region’s struggle for independence from Spain in the sixteenth century.” RobWords has more such surprising facts to reveal in the video just above, in which he breaks down the names of all the countries in the United Kingdom, covering Ireland, Scotland, Wales, his native England, and also the word Britain itself, as well as the Great often attached to it. The latter isn’t a boast, he stresses, but rather a means of distinguishing the island from part of France. As for which part, you’ll have to watch to find out.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hear the First Book of Homer’s Iliad Read Aloud in the Original Greek

in History, Language, Literature | June 4th, 2026

You can, of course, learn the Greek language as it’s spoken today. You can also learn Greek as it was spoken in antiquity — and as it was, until fairly recently in historical time, taught to students in the modern West. But it’s a fairly different endeavor again to learn Greek as Homer spoke it. The fact of the matter is that no human being ever really spoke like Achilles, Agamemnon, Odysseus, Penelope, or any of the other characters in the Iliad and Odyssey. Homer’s many literary achievements through these works include the creation and command of a kind of synthesized poetic Greek, combining qualities of regional Ionic and Aeolic dialects with various forms and expressions that were outdated even in the eighth century BC. If it served the meter, Homer used it.

Needless to say, when most of us attempt to read Homer aloud in the original, we get it all or mostly wrong, even if we’re familiar with modern Greek. We’d have to spend a long time indeed in the world of classicists before hearing a more accurate recording than the one above, delivered by a YouTuber called Thomas Whichello.

On his channel, Whichello specializes in performing venerable literary texts with a pronunciation and cadence as close to period-accurate as possible, often in the original language, sometimes with his own musical accompaniment. He’s done readings of the Bible, Shakespeare, Keats, and Wilde, but none so far has been so popular as his rendition of the first book of the Iliad, accompanied by subtitles of Homer’s text and an English translation.

A Greek here in 2026 with no particular knowledge of the classical language may understand a quarter of the individual words Whichello uses, and maybe half of them in certain passages. Actually being able to follow the story, however, is another matter. Still, you can get a surprising amount out of the video even if you understand nothing at all, since Whichello is aiming not just for linguistic accuracy, but also emotional resonance in his delivery. Ignore his glasses, button-down shirt, microphone, and window frame, and you could almost be sitting around a campfire with him nearly 30 centuries ago. Note, also, that the commenters include genuine classicists who call his the best reading they’ve ever heard — as well as viewers, credentialed or otherwise, eager to hear him name all those mighty Achaean ships in Book 2.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Hip 1960s Latin Teacher Translated Beatles Songs into Latin for His Students: Read Lyrics for “O Teneum Manum,” “Diei Duri Nox” & More

in Language, Music | June 1st, 2026

I’ve interacted with many entertaining language-learning resources in various classes—from miniseries in Spanish to comic books in French—all geared toward making the unfamiliar language relevant to daily life. Learning counterintuitive pronunciations, parsing a new system of grammar, or memorizing the genders of word after word can be laborious and intimidating in the classroom. Doing so in everyday pop cultural settings, not as much.

When it comes to the teaching of dead languages, the resources can seem less approachable. I certainly appreciate the literary and rhetorical genius of Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Cicero, and Julius Caesar. But during my high school years, I did not always find their work easy to read in English, much less in formal classical Latin. The elation I felt after successfully translating a passage was sometimes dampened as I puzzled over historical notes and glosses that often left me with more questions than answers.

That’s not at all to say that students of Latin shouldn’t be exposed to cultural and historical context or read the finest exemplars of the written language. Only that a break from the heavy stuff now and then goes a long way. Might I submit to Latin instructors one ingenious tool from Eddie O’Hara, former British Labour Party MP and classics teacher? O’Hara passed away in May 2016, and not long after his death, his son Terry O’Hara tweeted these translations of Beatles songs (including two Christmas tunes) his father made in the 60s for his students. At the time, these were the height of pop culture relevance, and, while a far cry from the complexities of the Aeneid, a fun way for Latin learners to relate to a language that can seem cold and imposing.

I will admit, my Latin has fallen into such a state that I can’t immediately vouch for the accuracy or elegance of these translations (“cue fierce arguments among Latin grammarians,” replies one Twitter user), but there’s no reason to doubt Mr. O’Hara knew his stuff. ““He was a born educator,” his son remembers, “He was a teacher and classicist by background and he had a strong interest in educational matters and Greek cultural heritage.” Educated himself at Magdalen College, Oxford, O’Hara taught at Perse School, Cambridge, Birkenhead School, and in the early 70s, C.F. Mott College in the Beatles’ own Liverpool.

In addition to his role as a statesman, the Liverpool Echo remembers O’Hara’s many decades as “a popular teacher who brought classes to life translating Beatles lyrics into Latin.” We do not have any indication of whether he actually tried to sing the lyrics, though his students surely must have attempted it. What must the chorus of “All My Loving” sound like as “Ita totum amorem dabo, Tibi totum, numquam cessaba”? Or “She Loves You” as “Amat te, mehercle”? Singing them to myself, I can see that O’Hara was sensitive to the meter of the original English in his Latin renderings. But I’d really love to see someone set these to music and make a video. Any of our readers up to the challenge?

Finally, since early sixties Beatles lyrics aren’t as likely to engage students in 2017, what pop cultural material would you translate today—classics teachers out there—to reach the bemused, bewildered, and the bored? If you’re already hard at work using hip resources in the classroom, please do share them with us in the comments!

Note: To view the images in a larger format, please click on the links to these individual images: Image 1 - Image 2 — Image 3. When the image opens, click on it again to zoom in.

Note 2: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Discover Khipu, the Ancient Incan Record & Writing System Made Entirely of Knots

in Design, History, Language | February 6th, 2026

Khipus, the portable information archives created by the Inca, may stir up memories of 1970s macrame with their long strands of intricately knotted, earth-toned fibers, but their function more closely resembled that of a densely plotted computerized spreadsheet.

As Cecilia Pardo-Grau, lead curator of the British Museum’s current exhibition Peru: a journey in time explains in the above Curators Corner episode, khipus were used to keep track of everything from inventories and censuses to historical narratives, using a system that assigned meaning to the type and position of knot, spaces between knots, cord length, fiber color, etc.

Much of the information preserved within khipus has yet to be deciphered by modern scholars, though the Open Khipu Repository — computational anthropologist Jon Clindaniel’s open-source database — makes it possible to compare the patterns of hundreds of khipus residing in museum and university collections.

Even in the Incan Empire, few were equipped to make sense of a khipu. This task fell to quipucamayocs, highborn administrative officials trained since childhood in the creation and interpretation of these organic spreadsheets.

Fleet messengers known as chaskis transported khipus on foot between administrative centers, creating an information superhighway that predates the Internet by some five centuries. Khipus’ sturdy organic cotton or native camelid fibers were well suited to withstanding both the rigors of time and the road.

A 500-year-old composite khipu that found its way to the British Museum organics conservator Nicole Rode prior to the exhibition was intact, but severely tangled, with a brittleness that betrayed its age. Below, she describes falling under the khipu’s spell, during the painstaking process of restoring it to a condition whereby researchers could attempt to glean some of its secrets.

Visit Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino’s website to learn more about khipu in a series of fascinating short articles that accompanied their groundbreaking 2003 exhibit QUIPU: counting with knots in the Inka Empire.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2022.

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Dictionary of the Oldest Written Language–It Took 90 Years to Complete, and It’s Now Free Online

in History, Language | January 7th, 2026

It took 90 years to complete. But, in 2011, scholars at the University of Chicago finally published a 21-volume dictionary of Akkadian, the language used in ancient Mesopotamia. Unspoken for 2,000 years, Akkadian was preserved on clay tablets and in stone inscriptions until scholars deciphered it during the last two centuries.

In the past, we’ve published audio that lets you hear the reconstructed sounds of Akkadian (Hear The Epic of Gilgamesh Read in the Original Akkadian and Enjoy the Sounds of Mesopotamia). Now, should you wish, you can download PDFs of U. Chicago’s Akkadian dictionary for free. All 21 volumes would cost well over $1,945 if purchased in hard copy. But the PDFs, they won’t run you a dime.

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

How Far Back in History Can You Start to Understand English?

in English Language, History, Language | December 29th, 2025

It’s easy to imagine the myriad difficulties with which you’d be faced if you were suddenly transported a millennium back in time. But if you’re a native (or even proficient) English speaker in an English-speaking part of the world, the language, at least, surely wouldn’t be a problem. Or so you’d think, until your first encounter with utterances like “þat troe is daed on gaerde” or “þa rokes forleten urne tun.” Both of those sentences appear in the new video above from Simon Roper, in which he delivers a monologue beginning in the English of the fifth century and ending in the English of the end of the last millennium.

An Englishman specializing in videos about linguistics and anthropology, Roper has pulled off this sort of feat before: we previously featured him here on Open Culture for his performance of a London accent as it evolved through 660 years.

But writing and delivering a monologue that works its way through a millennium and a half of change in the English language is obviously a thornier endeavor, not least because it involves literal thorns — the þ characters, that is, used in the Old English Latin alphabet. They’re pronounced like th, which you can hear when Roper speaks the sentences quoted earlier, which translate to “The tree is dead in the yard” and “The rooks abandoned our town.”

The word translate should give us pause, since we’re only talking about English. But then, English has undergone such a dramatic evolution that, at far enough of a remove, we might as well be talking about different languages. What Roper emphasizes is that the changes didn’t happen suddenly. Non-Scandinavian listeners may lack even an inkling that his farmer of the year 450 is talking about sheep and pigs with the words skēpu and swīnu, but his final lines, in which he speaks of possessing “all the hot coffee I need” and “friends I didn’t have in New York” in the year 2000, will pose no difficulty to Anglophones anywhere in the world. Even his list of agricultural wealth around the early thirteenth century — “We habben an god hus, we habben mani felds” — could make you believe that a trip 600 years in the past would be, as they said in Middle English, no trouble.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 32 ) |

The Genius Logic of the NATO Phonetic Alphabet: How It Was Created & How It Works

Why Reading Egyptian Hieroglyphics Is Easier Than You Think

Where Did Europe’s Countries—and the United Kingdom—Get Their Names?

Hear the First Book of Homer’s Iliad Read Aloud in the Original Greek

Hip 1960s Latin Teacher Translated Beatles Songs into Latin for His Students: Read Lyrics for “O Teneum Manum,” “Diei Duri Nox” & More

Discover Khipu, the Ancient Incan Record & Writing System Made Entirely of Knots

Dictionary of the Oldest Written Language–It Took 90 Years to Complete, and It’s Now Free Online

How Far Back in History Can You Start to Understand English?

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