Welcome to Signore Galilei – here’s what to expect

This blog is for Inkhaven. Inkhaven is a 30-day blogging extravaganza where I and several other writers will each be posting every day for the entire month of November 2025. There’s a tracking site with all the participants’ blogs. Thanks to my initials and the makers of the Proto-Sinaitic script,¹ I get to be first on the list – such pressure!

This blog is for the viewers of Signore Galilei, a YouTube channel that I started almost 6 years ago, and which has grown greater than I would have ever hoped when I first began. Millions of you have tuned in to see with fresh eyes the forgotten and overlooked parts of our world, our history, and our universe – forgotten planets, Hawaiian Islands, Great Lakes, and more. I really hope to bring the same Galilean spirit of inquiry to this blog, too.

This blog is for the kind of person who likes swapping cool facts with their friends. That’s basically the whole reason I’ve made this blog, my channel, my books, and all the writing I’ve shared.

But mainly, this blog is about curiosity. Curiosity comes in many forms. It might be making connections between distant branches of the tree of knowledge. It might be doing experiments. It might be working through puzzles. I expect all of these will show up on this blog, and more.

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Let’s start with the title of this post. You might have seen “Hello, world!” as a title for a first post. “Ahoy ahoy, mound!” is “Hello, world!” if two bits of history went different, and one bit the same.

“Hello, world!” comes from computer programming. Making the computer display this simple message is a common intro to a new programming language. It’s the first exercise in the ever popular 1978 textbook The C Programming Language, though it dates back even further than that.

We can break this phrase down. Why do we greet people with “Hello”?

Telephones.

Before telephones, people would greet one another with the time of day. Think “good morning”, or “good evening” – which still have a place in our speech. But telephones, and in particular long distance telephones, meant that you couldn’t always know what time of day it was for the person you were talking to. We needed an alternative.

Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, would answer with “ahoy, ahoy”.² It never caught on. Thomas Edison instead preferred “hello”, which clearly did catch on, and eventually spread from phone calls to general conversation. Like “ahoy”, “hello” was also originally a word to get someone’s attention, like “yoo-hoo!” is today. “Hey!” is currently making the same shift.

So that explains the “Ahoy ahoy”. How does “world” get replaced with “mound”?

The word “world” is an old word in the Germanic languages, but fairly new in English. Literally, it means “an age of man” – from the roots “wer+ald”, with “wer” meaning man (as in “werewolf”, and cognate with “virile”) and “ald” meaning an age or era of life (think “old”).³

In middle English (around the time of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in the late 1300s), we often see an alternative word for the world, a loanword from Medieval French: “mounde” (roughly pronounced “MOON-duh”).⁴ Since then, English has gone through some major spelling and pronunciation changes. Most notably, there’s the “great vowel shift”.⁵ “Long” vowels in Middle English were just lengthened versions of their short counterparts, so “long a” would be an “a” with a longer duration. That changed during the great vowel shift, creating the weird set of “long” and “short” vowel sounds that confuse kindergarten kids today.

The great vowel shift can explain even more of our confusing language. In Middle English, a multi-syllable word would have a longer vowel than a single syllable word. Plus, lots of words had an extra short “e” sound at the end (think “Ye Olde Towne Shoppe”). When long vowels started shifting away from their short counterparts, those extra “e” sounds required the previous vowel to shift. Even though final “e” sounds were later dropped from English, the remnant silent “e”s still mark a long vowel.

How would “mounde” go through all these shifts? Luckily, we don’t have to guess. Modern English “mound” – as in a heap – comes from a homonym of “mounde”. We can also look to rhymes – like how we get “round” from “rounde”. “Mound” is a pretty clear answer to complete our phrase.

So wherever in the mound you may be, ahoy ahoy! Welcome to the blog.

Coming up: A formula for round numbers