Read, play, and learn a new language!

Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity In Words of Four Letters or Less

simple and private translation

My last name and the word for ball or sphere sound a lot alike.

dunce

“But now in our age it is growne to be a common prouerbe in derision, to call such a person as is senselesse or without learning a Duns, which is as much as a foole.”

Francis Thynne, Holinshed’s Chronicles, 1587

The word dunce hasn’t always meant, well, dunce. Named for Scottish scholastic theologian John Duns Scotus, it first referred to a follower of Duns’s teachings, says the OED. Then it gained the derisive meaning of “a hair-splitting reasoner,” due to later philosophers who ridiculed his work, as well as “a dull pedant” and finally someone dull-witted.

Dunce cap might have first been used by Charles Dickens in his novel, The Old Curiosity Shop: “Displayed on hooks upon the wall in all their terrors, were the cane and ruler; and near them, on a small shelf of its own, the dunce’s cap, made of old newspapers and decorated with glaring wafers of the largest size.”

You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction.

For much of the last millennium, Yiddish was the lingua franca of the Ashkenazi Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. A unique blend of old German, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Slavic languages, it reflects the religious, social, and economic challenges and triumphs of the Jewish people. While Hebrew was reserved for prayer, Yiddish is the language of study, conversation and celebration.

Free and Open Source Machine Translation API

Esperanto, taught in toki pona.