Linguistics

North of My Foot: Languages Without ‘Left’ and ‘Right’

Imagine a world without 'left' or 'right,' where you'd say "there's a bug on your south leg." This post explores…

4 weeks ago

The Chinese Room: Can a Machine Ever Understand?

John Searle's famous "Chinese Room" thought experiment poses a timeless challenge to the idea of a truly thinking machine. By…

4 weeks ago

When Did We Start Asking Questions?

Questions represent a monumental leap in human evolution, demanding a complex toolkit of intonation, syntax, and abstract words like "why."…

4 weeks ago

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Have you ever felt a longing for a place you've never been, or the bittersweetness of a fleeting moment you…

4 weeks ago

Feeling Speech: The Tadoma Method

Imagine a conversation without sound or sight, where words aren't heard but are understood through the delicate dance of vibrations…

4 weeks ago

Counting in Base-20: A World Beyond Ten

Why do we count in tens? While it seems natural, many cultures from the Mayans to the Basques developed sophisticated…

4 weeks ago

Reading Speech: Secrets of the Spectrogram

What if you could see your own voice? Spectrograms, or "voiceprints," are powerful tools that turn the fleeting sounds of…

4 weeks ago

Turkey’s Alphabet Revolution

Explore one of history's most radical linguistic reforms: Turkey's 1928 Alphabet Revolution. At the direction of Atatürk, the nation abandoned…

4 weeks ago

The Balkan Sprachbund: A Linguistic Melting Pot

What happens when unrelated languages live side-by-side for centuries? In the Balkans, languages as different as Albanian, Greek, and Romanian…

4 weeks ago

The Great Germanic Sound Shift

Long before English vowels did their famous shuffle, a far more ancient and dramatic event rocked its linguistic family tree.…

4 weeks ago

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