Linguistics

The Mechanical Mouth: A History of Speech Synthesis

From the bellows-powered talking heads of the 18th century to the neural networks that voice our smart assistants, the quest…

3 weeks ago

The Tongue’s Thousand-Word Marathon

Speaking feels effortless, but it's a high-speed athletic event happening right in your mouth. Discover the incredible biomechanics of articulation,…

3 weeks ago

The Language That Clings to the Past: Sorbian

Deep within modern Germany, a Slavic language called Sorbian holds onto a grammatical feature lost by almost all others: the…

3 weeks ago

The Mind That Became an Adverb

Discover the fascinating story of how Romance languages created their adverbs. The Latin word for "mind", *mens*, gradually fused with…

3 weeks ago

The Power of ‘-ito’: Romance Diminutives

Discover how a simple suffix like -ito or -ino can transform a word's meaning in Romance languages. This deep dive…

3 weeks ago

The Death of the Latin Passive

Latin once expressed complex passive ideas with a single word, like amor for "I am loved". This post explores how…

3 weeks ago

Mozarabic: The Lost Romance Tongue

Journey back to medieval Spain to uncover the story of Mozarabic, the lost Romance language of Christians living under Muslim…

3 weeks ago

The Subjunctive’s Shadow World

For many language learners, the subjunctive is a grammatical nightmare. But what if it's not just about rules? This post…

3 weeks ago

The Brazil-Portugal Spelling War

Imagine a civil war fought not with weapons, but with dictionaries. For decades, Brazil and Portugal have been locked in…

3 weeks ago

France’s Base-20 Math Problem

Why do the French say 'four-twenties' for 80? This linguistic quirk is a fascinating relic from a base-20 counting system…

3 weeks ago

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