Indo-European

The Two ‘Haves’ of Irish: Possession as a State

Unlike English, the Irish language doesn't have a single verb for "to have." Instead, to say "I have a book",…

8 hours ago

The Birth of Grammatical Gender in PIE

Why is a table feminine in French? The answer is thousands of years old and has little to do with…

7 days ago

Why Tocharian Was an Anomaly

Imagine discovering a lost language in Western China that looks far more like Latin or Irish than its immediate neighbors,…

7 days ago

OCS: The First Slavic Literary Language

Before there was Russian, Polish, or Bulgarian, there was their common literary ancestor: Old Church Slavonic. Discover the story of…

7 days ago

Pashto’s Split Ergativity

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

7 days 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.…

7 days 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…

1 week 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…

1 week 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…

1 week 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…

1 week ago

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