Languages of the World

Speaking in Tones: The Art and Science of Politeness in Japanese (Keigo)

Beyond "konnichiwa" lies Keigo, a complex system of Japanese politeness that goes far beyond simple pleasantries. This linguistic art form…

4 months ago

The Fight for Purity: Inside the Académie Française and the Quest to Protect the French Language

For nearly 400 years, the forty "immortals" of the Académie Française have stood as the official guardians of the French…

4 months ago

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

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

4 months ago

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

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

4 months ago

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

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

4 months ago

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

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

4 months ago

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

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

4 months ago

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

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

4 months ago

Punctuation Reimagined: Hervé Bazin’s Linguistic Innovations

Hervé Bazin (1911-1996), a famous French writer and essayist, is known not only for his literary contributions but also for…

2 years ago

Where is Esperanto Spoken?

Esperanto, the most successful constructed international auxiliary language, was invented in the late 19th century by L. L. Zamenhof with…

2 years ago

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