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 East" accessible only to the elite. This post explores the…
Asian Languages
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 structures. This post explores *Kanbun Kundoku*, the ingenious system of…
Cyrillic Persian: Why Tajik Scripts Changed 3 Times
Tajik is the only variety of the Persian language officially written in Cyrillic, a result of turbulent 20th-century Soviet policies that saw the script change three times in two decades.…
Retro-Engineering: How Sanskrit Shaped Modern Hindi
Unlike languages that evolve naturally, Modern Standard Hindi was deliberately "retro-engineered" in the 19th century to establish a distinct identity from Urdu. This post explores how scholars utilized "Tatsamas"—unmodified Sanskrit…
English Words Borrowed From Tamil: More Than Just Curry
While most people know the word "curry" hails from India, few realize that everyday English words like "mango", "catamaran", and "teak" trace their roots back to the ancient Tamil language.…
A Measure for Everything: How Mandarin Categorizes the World
In Mandarin Chinese, you cannot simply say "three books"—grammatical rules force speakers to categorize the world through specific classifiers based on shape, state, or function. This article explores how words…
The Case of the Missing Consonants: Mandarin’s Evolution
Unlike its southern relatives such as Cantonese, standard Mandarin has completely lost the "entering tone" and the clipped final stops (-p, -t, -k) which characterized Middle Chinese. This linguistic deep…
Drawing Snakes with Feet: The Storytelling Power of Chengyu
Mandarin chengyu (four-character idioms) act as "cultural zip files", compressing complex historical tales into compact phrases like "to draw a snake and add feet." This article explores how these ancient…
The Bride of Scripts: Why Urdu Uses Nastaʿlīq
Explore the visual and linguistic allure of Urdu's "hanging" script, Nastaʿlīq. This article delves into why Urdu defies the flat baseline of standard Arabic computer fonts in favor of a…
Hindi vs. Urdu: Sister Languages or the Same Entity?
While Hindi and Urdu rely on completely different writing systems and divergent formal vocabularies—drawing from Sanskrit and Persian respectively—they share an identical grammatical skeleton known as Hindustani. This article explores…
From Army Camps to Poetry: The Surprising Origins of Urdu
Discover the fascinating linguistic evolution of Urdu, a language that began as a practical means of communication in Mughal army camps (Ordu) and transformed into the refined literary medium of…
Nivkh: The Mysterious Isolate of Sakhalin Island
Discover Nivkh, a mysterious language isolate indigenous to Sakhalin Island and the Amur River that has survived centuries of pressure from Russian, Japanese, and Tungusic neighbors. Formerly known by the…
Transliteration vs. Transcription: What’s the Difference?
Confused why "Peking" became "Beijing", or why "Quran" is sometimes spelled "Koran"? It all comes down to the linguistic battle between Transliteration (mapping letters) and Transcription (mapping sounds). This post…
Italian of the East: Unlocking Telugu’s Melodic Secret
Discover the fascinating linguistics behind Telugu, often called the "Italian of the East" due to its unique 'Ajanta' structure where every word ends in a vowel. This article explores how…
Madala Panji: The Temple Chronicles of Odia
Discover the Madala Panji, the drum-shaped palm-leaf chronicles of the Jagannath Temple, which mark a revolutionary shift from verse to prose in Indian literature. This article delves into how the…
How Palm Leaves Shaped the Odia Script
Explore the fascinating intersection of linguistics and material science by discovering how the fragile nature of palm leaves dictated the shape of the Odia alphabet. We examine why ancient scribes…
The Irony of ‘Hindi’: A Persian Name, A Sanskrit Soul
The name "Hindi" is a Persian exonym meaning "of the Indus", yet the modern formal language is defined by a rigorous purging of Persian and Arabic vocabulary in favor of…
Hindi and Urdu: Twins Separated by a Script
Hindi and Urdu represent a fascinating linguistic paradox: they are mutually intelligible in conversation yet largely incomprehensible to one another in writing. This article explores the history of "Hindustani", the…
A Royal Tongue: The Golden Age of Telugu
Travel back to the 16th-century Vijayanagara Empire to discover why Emperor Krishnadevaraya famously declared Telugu the "greatest of the nation's languages." This article explores the linguistic evolution of the "Italian…
One Language, Two Anthems: The Power of Bengali Poetry
Discover the unique linguistic phenomenon of Bengali, the only language in the world to claim the national anthems of two sovereign nations: India and Bangladesh. We explore the legacy of…