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One of the charts used as we tell The Story of Our Numerals depicts Ancient Greek Numerals.  Upon inspection (and comparison with the text of the story), it seems that although the story states that the symbol used by the Ancient Greeks to represent the numeral “5” was pi  (the first letter of the Ancient Greek word for five, pente), the chart, appears to depict the Greek letter gamma for the numeral 5!     So what’s going on? The Ancient Greeks had 2 different numerals systems, one of which succeeded the other.  First came the Acrophonic system (also called Attic or Herodian), then later,...

Long ago, the ancient Chinese navigated across trackless deserts because they knew that a type of stone, now called lodestone (from the Old English word, lãd= course) or magnetite (from Magnesia, in Thessaly, Greece, where deposits of magnetite were found) would align itself in an approximately north/south direction when suspended from a thread.  Some ancient Greeks believed that there were magnetic islands, made of lode-stone, that could attract the nails and other iron objects in a ship.  Vessels that disappeared at sea were said to have been pulled helplessly to these islands.  (There was even a story, not nowadays believed to...

Compound sentences can be formed by combining simple sentences using coordinating Conjunctions (FANBOYS:  For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet, So), by Correlative Conjunctions (either ... or, neither ... nor, etc.), or by semi-colons.

Independent clauses may also be joined by Conjunctive Adverbs to form a Compound Sentence.  A conjunctive adverb may be identified by the punctuation accompanying it ...