Indo-European

The Fairy Tale Behind ‘Serendipity’

The delightful word 'serendipity' wasn't a happy accident itself, but a deliberate creation by 18th-century writer Horace Walpole. Inspired by…

2 months ago

The Sound Forged by Fire: Welsh’s ‘LL’

The Welsh 'll' is more than just a tricky sound for language learners; it's a voiceless fricative with a deep…

2 months ago

Mednyj Aleut: A Hybrid Tongue

Mednyj Aleut is a rare "mixed language" from the Commander Islands that defies typical linguistic classification. It was created by…

2 months ago

How a Phoneme is Born

Language sounds are always in flux, but where do new ones come from? This article explores the fascinating linguistic process…

3 months ago

The Case for Compounding

Behold the German word Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän. Far from being a chaotic jumble of letters, this linguistic titan is a masterclass in…

3 months ago

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",…

3 months 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…

3 months 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,…

3 months 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…

3 months 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'…

3 months ago

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