Linguistics

The Teachers Who Invented Scientific Speech

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is the gold standard for writing down sounds, but its origins are surprisingly humble. Discover…

1 month ago

A Computer Learns ‘Amo, Amas, Amat’

Long before AI could write a poem, the pioneers of computational linguistics took on a monumental task: teaching a room-sized…

1 month ago

The Keyboard That Looked Like a Piano

Before QWERTY conquered the world, the first typewriter prototype had keys arranged in two simple rows like a piano. This…

1 month ago

The Scholar Who Built a National Epic

Meet Elias Lönnrot, the 19th-century Finnish physician who traveled thousands of kilometers on foot and ski to collect the fading…

1 month 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…

1 month ago

How ‘Spinster’ Became an Insult

The word 'spinster' didn't always evoke images of a lonely old maid. It originally meant a woman who spun thread…

1 month ago

The First Family of Esperanto

L. L. Zamenhof may have invented Esperanto, but he didn't bring it to life alone. This is the story of…

1 month ago

The Dictionary’s Phantom: Story of ‘Dord’

What happens when a word that doesn't exist appears in the dictionary? For thirteen years, the non-word 'dord' lived in…

1 month ago

The Dad Who Taped 90,000 Hours of Baby Talk

What if you could record every moment of your child's life to understand how they learn to talk? MIT researcher…

1 month ago

When Grammar Breaks Free: A Look at Excorporation

Excorporation is a rare linguistic process where a grammatical piece, once bound inside a larger word, "escapes" to become an…

1 month ago

This website uses cookies.