Finland’s “Possessive Suffixes”
In English, we say 'my house', but Finnish takes a more intimate approach. Instead of a separate word for 'my', ownership is baked directly into…
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Why Tocharian Was an Anomaly
Imagine discovering a lost language in Western China that looks far more like Latin or Irish than its immediate neighbors, Sanskrit and Persian. The extinct…
Hmong’s Tonal Writing System
Discover the Romanized Popular Alphabet (RPA), the ingenious writing system for the Hmong language. In this linguistic deep-dive, you'll learn how the final consonant of…
OCS: The First Slavic Literary Language
Before there was Russian, Polish, or Bulgarian, there was their common literary ancestor: Old Church Slavonic. Discover the story of the language crafted by two…
Hawaiian and the Phonemic Principle
With only eight consonants and five vowels, the Hawaiian alphabet is a perfect example of the phonemic principle, where each letter consistently corresponds to a…
The Yi Script: China’s Living Logogram
While most of China uses Chinese characters, the Yi people of the southwest have their own unique writing system with a history spanning centuries. Once…
Pashto’s Split Ergativity
Ever thought the 'subject' of a sentence was a fixed, simple concept? In Pashto, the grammatical role of the 'doer' dramatically shifts depending on whether…
The Georgian Consonant Clusters
Georgian is famous for jaw-dropping consonant clusters like `gvprtskvni` ("you peel us"), which seem to defy the rules of pronunciation. But these words are not…
The Altaic Debate: A Family Feud
Are Turkish, Mongolian, Korean, and Japanese distant cousins? The Altaic hypothesis proposes they descend from a single ancient tongue, but modern linguistics has a different…
The French R: An Aristocratic Sound?
The guttural French "R" is one of the most iconic sounds in the world, but it's a surprisingly recent development. Discover how this sound may…
The Three Genders of Dyirbal
Ever heard of a language that groups women, fire, and dangerous things into a single grammatical category? Dive into the fascinating world of Dyirbal, an…
The Great ‘Bet/Vet’ Split in Hebrew
Ever stumbled over whether to say 'bet' or 'vet' in Hebrew? This seemingly random choice is a window into a fascinating historical sound change affecting…
Tone vs. Intonation Explained
Ever wondered why saying 'mΔ' in Mandarin can mean 'mother' while 'mΗ' means 'horse'? Or how the exact same words, "You're leaving", can be a…
The ‘We’ of Two vs. The ‘We’ of All
Most languages count one and many, but what about a number for precisely two? Discover the "grammatical dual", a lost feature of Old English that…
The Syntax of Your File System
Did you know that every time you save a file, you're using a form of language? Your computer's folder structure is a surprisingly complex grammatical…
The Inuktitut “Word-Sentences”
Imagine a language where "I don't hear very well" isn't a sentence, but a single, perfectly grammatical word. Welcome to the fascinating world of Inuktitut,…
The Social Meaning of H-Dropping
H-dropping, the act of saying "'ouse" instead of "house", is far more than a simple pronunciation quirk. This feature of many English dialects became a…
Writing Your Voice: The Blissymbols System
Dive into the world of Blissymbols, a fascinating ideographic writing system designed as a universal language. Explore its logical grammar, where simple symbols for "house"…
The Grammar of Evidentials in Quechua
In Quechua, itβs grammatically impossible to state a fact without also specifying how you know it. This fascinating system of "evidentiality" uses suffixes like -mi…
Why Korean and Japanese Share Grammar
Are Korean and Japanese related languages? While they feel incredibly similar to learners, the answer from linguists is "no." This uncanny resemblance isn't due to…