Language Families

Pashto’s Split Ergativity

Ever thought the 'subject' of a sentence was a fixed, simple concept? In Pashto, the grammatical role of the 'doer'…

4 weeks ago

The Altaic Debate: A Family Feud

Are Turkish, Mongolian, Korean, and Japanese distant cousins? The Altaic hypothesis proposes they descend from a single ancient tongue, but…

4 weeks ago

The French R: An Aristocratic Sound?

The guttural French "R" is one of the most iconic sounds in the world, but it's a surprisingly recent development.…

4 weeks ago

The Social Meaning of H-Dropping

H-dropping, the act of saying "'ouse" instead of "house", is far more than a simple pronunciation quirk. This feature of…

4 weeks ago

The Ghost Phonemes of Irish

Why does the "s" in the Irish word "sláinte" sound like an "sh"? The answer lies in slender and broad…

4 weeks ago

The Glottal Stop’s Secret Life in English

Think the glottal stop is just for Cockney accents? Think again. This unwritten consonant is hiding in plain sight in…

4 weeks ago

The World’s Quietest Shift: The Great Silence of French

Move beyond the Great Vowel Shift and explore French's "Great Silence"—the massive, historical loss of final consonants. This single change…

4 weeks ago

The Fossilized Question: Grammaticalization of Verbs

When you ask, "Do you speak English?", what is the word 'do' really doing? This seemingly simple word is actually…

4 weeks ago

The Echo Vowel: Parasitic Vowels in Irish and Japanese

Have you ever heard a vowel that wasn't spelled, like the "a" in the Irish word *uisce* (ish-ka)? This phenomenon,…

4 weeks ago

The Uralic Enigma: A Lost Siberian Homeland

Ever wondered why Finnish and Hungarian sound nothing like their European neighbors? These languages are part of the Uralic family,…

4 weeks ago

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