Unlocking the Universe of Languages
In the Middle Ages, scarce parchment was often scraped clean and reused, creating layered manuscripts known as palimpsests. Today, linguists and scientists use multispectral imaging to "see" through the top…
Long before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, the Kingdom of Aksum produced the Ezana Stone, a trilingual monument inscribed in Ancient Greek, Sabaean, and Ge'ez. This article explores how…
While we casually use words like 'Avatar' and 'Karma' in daily English, their journey from the ancient Vedas involves a fascinating process of semantic bleaching. This article unpacks the profound…
While Etruscan has long been considered a mysterious "language isolate", the discovery of the Lemnos Stele in the Aegean Sea revealed it actually had a close relative. This post explores…
While most assume the Latin alphabet evolved directly from Greek, the true story features a vital middleman: the Etruscans. This post explores the linguistic detective story of how an ancient…
Discover the bizarre linguistic journey of the Liber Linteus, the longest surviving Etruscan text, which was cut into strips and used to wrap an Egyptian mummy. This post explores how…
Explore the history of the "Silver Bible", a 6th-century masterpiece written in silver and gold ink on purple vellum. We dive into the linguistic genius of Bishop Wulfila, who invented…
Contemporary with the famous Sumerian cuneiform, Proto-Elamite is a 5,000-year-old script from ancient Iran that remains almost entirely undeciphered. This blog explores the linguistic challenges of cracking a code that…
The Indus Valley Civilization left behind magnificent ruins and thousands of mysterious seals featuring a "unicorn" and short strings of symbols. Despite modern AI and linguistic analysis, this ancient script…
Coptic is often mistaken for a dead language, but it serves as the final, living link to the Ancient Egyptian spoken by the Pharaohs. This article explores the linguistic evolution…
In 1945, a peasant in Upper Egypt unearthed a jar containing the "forbidden" Gnostic Gospels, forever altering religious history. This article explores how the Sahidic dialect of Coptic served as…
While the Coptic script appears remarkably similar to Greek, it hides a linguistic secret: seven unique letters borrowed from the ancient Demotic script. This article explores how these "surviving" characters…
Long before the iPad, the Romans mastered mobile communication with the "tabula"—a reusable wax tablet that functioned as the ancient world's scratchpad. This article explores how the physical constraints of…
Long before AI could write a poem, the pioneers of computational linguistics took on a monumental task: teaching a room-sized computer grammar. This is the story of their work in…
How do you reconstruct the vowels of an ancient language when its descendants, like Hebrew and Arabic, were written without them? This linguistic detective story reveals how the chance survival…
Forget stuffy royal decrees. Ancient graffiti offers an unfiltered glimpse into the lives of everyday people, from lovelorn Romans to gossiping soldiers. These candid messages, scrawled on the walls of…
Explore Sumerian, the world's first written language and a fascinating linguistic isolate. Discovered on cuneiform tablets, this ancient tongue challenges our understanding of grammar with its agglutinative nature and mind-bending…
Imagine discovering a lost language in Western China that looks far more like Latin or Irish than its immediate neighbors, Sanskrit and Persian. The extinct Tocharian languages presented linguists with…
Before the internet, before the printing press, there was papyrus. This humble reed from the Nile wasn't just ancient paper; it was a revolutionary linguistic technology that allowed Egypt to…
Uncover the story of the Tangut script, a complex writing system that looks like Chinese but is entirely different. Created to forge a national identity for the Western Xia empire,…