The Character with No Sound

1 month ago

Before it was the linchpin of your email address, the @ symbol was a character without a sound, a silent…

The Logic of Blissymbols

1 month ago

Born from the horrors of war, Blissymbols was a universal language designed for peace, built on pure logic. This post…

Speaking with Hands and Mouth

1 month ago

In central Australia, the Arandic peoples use a complex sign language alongside speech, a system developed for times when speech…

The Linguistics of Lying

1 month ago

That moment a child tells their first lie—"Who ate the cookie?" "Not me!"—is more than just mischief. It's a monumental…

The Final Boss: Untranslatable Puns

1 month ago

You can conjugate verbs and debate politics, but can you understand a pun in your target language? This article breaks…

The Bilingual Inner Voice: Who Is Talking?

1 month ago

For bilinguals, the advice to "think in the language" opens a fascinating cognitive puzzle. The voice inside our heads is…

How Words Go Bad: The Science of Pejoration

1 month ago

Why did "silly" once mean "blessed," and "villain" just mean "farmhand"? This post explores pejoration, the fascinating linguistic process where…

Know Your Type: A Language Learning Hack

1 month ago

Is your target language a "Lego" language or a "sculpture" language? This practical framework introduces language typology (isolating, agglutinative, fusional)…

Language Ghosts: L2 to L3 Interference

1 month ago

Ever tried to speak your third language, only for a word from your second language to slip out? This phenomenon,…

The Army Method: A Story of Language Hacking

1 month ago

Before Duolingo's friendly owl, there was a system born from the desperate urgency of WWII. The Audiolingual Method, or "Army…

This website uses cookies.