The Language That Broke the Rules: Daniel Everett and the Pirahã Controversy

7 months ago

Deep in the Amazon, linguist Daniel Everett encountered a language that seemed to break all the rules. His claim that…

The Grammar of Silence: Why Sign Languages Are as Complex as Spoken Languages

7 months ago

Far from being simple pantomime, sign languages are a testament to the human brain's linguistic ingenuity. These visual-gestural systems possess…

The Language Catchers: Racing Against Time to Document Endangered Tongues

7 months ago

Every two weeks, a language dies, taking with it a unique way of seeing the world. Meet the "Language Catchers,"…

The Ultimate Ancestor: How Linguists Reconstructed the Proto-Indo-European Language

7 months ago

Imagine a language that vanished over 5,000 years ago, leaving behind no written records. This is Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the mysterious…

Canali on Mars: The 19th-Century Mistranslation That Invented a World

7 months ago

This post explores how Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli's 1877 description of "canali" (channels) on Mars was translated into English as…

The Surgeon and the Lexicographer: The Unlikely Genius Who Built the OED From an Asylum

7 months ago

The creation of the Oxford English Dictionary relied on thousands of volunteers, but none were as brilliant or enigmatic as…

A Word to Name the Unspeakable: Raphael Lemkin and the Creation of “Genocide”

7 months ago

Discover the powerful story of Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust and created a…

Reading the Knots: Quipu, the Inca’s Mysterious 3D Writing System

7 months ago

What if writing wasn't flat on a page, but a three-dimensional web of information you could hold in your hands?…

Seeing Blue: How the Language You Speak Changes Your Perception of Color

7 months ago

Do you see the same "blue" as a Russian speaker, who has two distinct words for the color? The fascinating…

Clicks, Pops, and Whistles: A Journey into the World’s Rarest Speech Sounds

7 months ago

Go beyond familiar consonants and vowels on a journey into the world's phonetic rarities, from the sharp clicks of Southern…

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