Language & Words
Loanwords are a record of who talked to whom
The borrowed vocabulary in a language is a layered account of contact, and the layers can be dated and attributed with surprising precision.
Topic
history
Every Kohopoho article tagged history — 4 pieces across 3 sections.
Places
Passes: the few places you can get through a mountain range
A mountain range is a wall with a small number of doors, and everything — trade, armies, languages, disease — has had to go through them.
Food Cultures
Coffee left Yemen and never went back
A plant from the Ethiopian highlands, cultivated in Yemen, spread through the Islamic world and then everywhere else, taking a set of social institutions with it.
Food Cultures
The chilli arrived recently, and rewrote several cuisines
Sichuan, Thai, Korean and Indian cooking are unimaginable without chilli, and none of them had it five hundred years ago.