The One-Word Sentence: A Deep Dive into Polysynthetic Languages

5 months ago

In languages like Inuktitut or Mohawk, a single, complex word can convey a thought that requires a full sentence in…

The Great Bantu Migration: How a Language Family Shaped Half a Continent

5 months ago

Over several millennia, a wave of migration spread a single language family from West-Central Africa to cover nearly the entire…

Tasting the Word ‘Tuesday’: The Extraordinary World of Lexical-Gustatory Synesthesia

5 months ago

What does the word 'Tuesday' taste like to you? For most of us, the question is nonsensical, but for individuals…

The Girl Who Couldn’t Speak: Genie and the Tragic Limits of the Critical Period for Language

5 months ago

The tragic case of "Genie," a feral child discovered in 1970 after a decade of silent isolation, offers a harrowing…

A Heckin’ Good Syntax: The Surprisingly Complex Grammar of DoggoLingo

5 months ago

Beyond the cute misspellings of "doggo" and "pupper," the internet phenomenon of DoggoLingo has developed its own surprisingly consistent grammatical…

The Chameleon Tone: Unlocking the Musical Logic of Mandarin’s Tone Sandhi

5 months ago

Mandarin is famously a tonal language, but what many learners quickly discover is that the tones they memorize often change…

Island Sign: The Spontaneous Birth of a Language in Martha’s Vineyard

5 months ago

Long before Nicaraguan Sign Language became famous, another sign language emerged organically on Martha's Vineyard. Due to a high rate…

The Syntax of Scent: Can We Ever Truly Describe Smells with Words?

5 months ago

Why can we describe a shade of blue with a dozen words, but struggle to articulate the scent of rain?…

The ELIZA Effect: Why We Talk to Chatbots Like They’re Human

5 months ago

Have you ever found yourself saying "please" and "thank you" to a chatbot or voice assistant? This is the ELIZA…

The Graveyard of Words: Who Decides When a Word Is Officially Dead?

5 months ago

For every new word that enters the dictionary, thousands of others fall into disuse and disappear into the graveyard of…

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