Languages of the World

The ‘About-To-Be’ Tense of Lithuanian

Lithuanian, one of Europe's oldest languages, possesses a fascinating grammatical tool that English lacks: a specific way to talk about…

4 months ago

The Sound That Separates Scottish and Irish Gaelic

They were once a single language spoken across Ireland and Scotland, but a crucial phonetic split sent them down different…

4 months ago

The Four ‘You’s of Mandarin Chinese

Think "you" is simple? In English, it is, but Mandarin Chinese requires a more nuanced approach. The choice between the…

4 months ago

How Hungarian Builds Words: The Agglutinative Engine

Explore the beauty of Hungarian, a language that builds incredibly long words by 'gluing' suffixes together in a process called…

4 months ago

Counting People in Japanese: The ‘Nin’ Counter

Learning to count in Japanese means mastering counters, and the one for people holds a fascinating secret. While most numbers…

4 months ago

The Two ‘To Be’s of Irish Gaelic

Like Spanish, Irish Gaelic has two verbs for 'to be', but the logic is entirely different. Instead of temporary vs.…

4 months ago

The Fluid Verb: Tense and Aspect in Swahili

Swahili verbs are masterpieces of modular design, built by "gluing" prefixes for tense, person, and more onto a single root.…

4 months ago

The Case of the Missing ‘Is’ in Russian

In Russian, "My brother is a doctor" becomes "Мой брат – врач" (My brother – doctor). This isn't a mistake…

4 months ago

The Amharic ‘And’: A Verb’s Best Friend

In English, we connect actions with a simple 'and.' But in Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia, this conjunction is…

4 months ago

Forgetting the Subject: The Case of Pro-Drop in Italian

Ever wonder why an Italian speaker says "Vado al cinema" instead of "Io vado al cinema"? This linguistic magic trick…

4 months ago

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