What are you learning in Linguistics, anyway??

1. Do you know where the English word "apricot" comes from?

The English word "apricot" comes from the Spanish “albaricoque” or Portuguese “albricoque.” The Spanish and Portuguese forms came from the Old Spanish “albarcoque.” The Old Spanish form likely comes from the Spanish Arabic “al-borcoq,” which is from the Arabic “al-burqūq” meaning the plum, which was from the Greek “praikokion,” which was probably from the Latin “praecoquus.” This Latin word is means ripe early, and comes from the Indo-European root pek^w meaning to cook or ripen.  Other English words that can also be traced back to the Indo-European root pek^w include "cuisine," "kitchen," "biscuit" and "pumpkin." These words all relate, however distantly, to the notions of cooking or ripening, even though they came to English through many different languages during historical periods of cultural contact. 

2. Look at the paragraph below. What does it mean??

It's actually a joke, just written in the International Phonetic Alphabet!
Here's my "translation" below:

Little Billy’s fifth grade teacher called his father one evening. “I’m sorry to tell you this,” she said, “but Billy cheated on his quiz today. He copied from the girl sitting next to him.”

“I don’t believe it,” his father said. “How do you know the girl didn’t copy the answers off of Billy’s test?”

“Well,” said the teacher, “Both sets of answers were the same all the way down the page, except for one last one. For that one she wrote ‘I don’t know,’ and Billy wrote, “Me neither.’”