Language Families

The Last Words of Old Prussian: How a Language Was Erased by the Sword

The death of a language is usually a slow fade, but Old Prussian was not so lucky. It was systematically…

4 weeks ago

Glib, Glim, and Grunt: A Secret History of Thieves’ Cant, the Anti-Language of the Underworld

In the shadowy corners of Renaissance England, a secret language was born out of desperation and defiance. Known as Thieves'…

4 weeks ago

Carved in Stone, Read on the Edge: Unlocking Ogham, Ireland’s Ancient Alphabet of Lines

Forget runes and hieroglyphs; journey to ancient Ireland to uncover Ogham, a script written not on a page but on…

4 weeks ago

Mayday, Mayday, Mayday: The High-Stakes Linguistics of Aviation English

Discover Aviation English, the meticulously engineered language designed to prevent disaster at 30,000 feet. From its unique phonetic alphabet to…

4 weeks ago

The Outrigger and the Noun Phrase: How the Austronesian Language Family Conquered the Pacific

How did one language family colonize a third of the planet, from Madagascar to Easter Island? The answer lies in…

4 weeks ago

U and Non-U: The Linguistic Class Divide That Rocked 1950s Britain

In the 1950s, a fierce debate erupted in Britain over a simple yet profound idea: that your choice of words…

4 weeks 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 weeks 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 weeks 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 weeks 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 weeks ago

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