Languages of the World

The Ezana Stone: Decoding Ethiopia’s Rosetta Stone

Long before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, the Kingdom of Aksum produced the Ezana Stone, a trilingual monument inscribed…

1 week ago

Pasporta Servo: The Original Analog Couchsurfing

Decades before Airbnb or Couchsurfing existed, Esperanto speakers built a global, offline hospitality network called Pasporta Servo. By using a…

1 week ago

Incubus: The Horror Cult Classic Filmed in Esperanto

Explore the bizarre history of *Incubus* (1966), the horror cult classic starring William Shatner that was filmed entirely in Esperanto.…

1 week ago

Meet Ў: The Letter Only Found in Belarusian

Discover the "Short U" (Ў), a unique Cyrillic character found exclusively in the Belarusian alphabet. We explore the linguistics behind…

1 week ago

Narkamaŭka vs. Taraškievica: A Tale of Two Spellings

Explore the fascinating linguistic divide in Belarus, where the choice between the official "Narkamaŭka" spelling and the classical "Taraškievica" is…

1 week ago

Why China Abandoned the “Latin of the East”

For over two millennia, the Sinosphere was united by a written language completely divorced from spoken speech—a "Latin of the…

1 week ago

Code-Switching on Paper: How Japan “Hacked” Classical Chinese

Japanese scholars spent centuries using Classical Chinese as their formal written language, despite the two languages having completely incompatible grammar…

1 week ago

Why It’s ‘Feet’ Not ‘Foots’: The Logic of I-Umlaut

Why do we say "feet" instead of "foots"? It isn't a random quirk of English grammar, but the result of…

1 week ago

Wit and Git: The Lost Dual Pronouns of Old English

Old English possessed a grammatical rarity called the "dual number", using specific pronouns—*wit* (we two) and *git* (you two)—to refer…

1 week ago

Runic Roots: From the Futhorc to the Letter Thorn

While modern English relies on the Latin alphabet, our language was originally written in the angular, 33-character runic system known…

1 week ago

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