The Alphabet That Isn’t: Unpacking the Logic of Abugidas and Abjads

2 months ago

Most of us learn the ABCs and assume all writing works this way, but that's just one piece of the…

Reading Between the Lines: The Art and Science of Subtitling

2 months ago

Subtitling is an unsung art form involving far more than direct translation. It's a delicate dance between art and science,…

The Language of the Sea: How Maritime Pidgin Shaped Global Communication

2 months ago

Long before English dominated global communication, the world's oceans were a linguistic laboratory where sailors, merchants, and pirates forged simplified…

The “Wug” Test: How a Fake Bird Revealed the Secrets of Child Language Acquisition

2 months ago

In 1958, a fictional bird called a "wug" helped solve one of the biggest mysteries of the human mind: how…

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

2 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

2 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

2 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

2 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

2 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

2 months ago

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

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