Language Families

The Mind That Became an Adverb

Discover the fascinating story of how Romance languages created their adverbs. The Latin word for "mind", *mens*, gradually fused with…

3 weeks ago

The Power of ‘-ito’: Romance Diminutives

Discover how a simple suffix like -ito or -ino can transform a word's meaning in Romance languages. This deep dive…

3 weeks ago

Mozarabic: The Lost Romance Tongue

Journey back to medieval Spain to uncover the story of Mozarabic, the lost Romance language of Christians living under Muslim…

3 weeks ago

The Subjunctive’s Shadow World

For many language learners, the subjunctive is a grammatical nightmare. But what if it's not just about rules? This post…

3 weeks ago

The Brazil-Portugal Spelling War

Imagine a civil war fought not with weapons, but with dictionaries. For decades, Brazil and Portugal have been locked in…

3 weeks ago

France’s Base-20 Math Problem

Why do the French say 'four-twenties' for 80? This linguistic quirk is a fascinating relic from a base-20 counting system…

3 weeks ago

The Walloon Language of Belgium

Belgium's linguistic landscape is famously divided, but beyond French and Dutch lies Walloon, a distinct Romance language with deep historical…

3 weeks ago

The Latin Echo in Spanish ‘ll’

Ever wonder why the Spanish word for 'rain' is *lluvia* when its Latin ancestor was *pluvia*? This transformation is no…

3 weeks ago

The Word Inside a Word: Infixation

We all know about prefixes and suffixes, but what about the "word inside a word"? This fascinating linguistic process, called…

3 weeks ago

The Ghost in the North: Sami’s Echo in Norwegian

While Norwegian is a Germanic language, centuries of contact have left it with linguistic "ghosts" from the indigenous Sami languages.…

3 weeks ago

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