Language and Literature library/did you know

...that Old English is grammatically closer to modern German than to modern English?
...that Slavonic languages are mutually more similar than the German dialects?
...that John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, has highly influenced later fictional literature worldwide? And did you know that he was also a great expert in languages, and that he has created about twenty artificial languages himself?
...that Esperanto is the most famous among many artificial languages? It is an auxiliary language created by Polish doctor Zamenhof, whose pseudonym was doctor Esperanto.
...that Tamil is the oldest surviving language in the world, still spoken in the state of Tamil Nadu, India.