Historical Linguistics

The Unwritten Archive: Linguistics of Oral Traditions

Before writing, societies preserved immense libraries of knowledge within the human mind. The "unwritten archive" of oral tradition wasn't based…

3 weeks ago

Case Syncretism: When Grammar Gets Efficient

Ever wondered why 'you' is the same whether you're doing the action or receiving it, unlike "I" and "me"? This…

3 weeks ago

Reading Without Breaks: The Cognitive Cost of Scriptio Continua

Ancient scripts were often written as an unbroken stream of letters, a practice known as scriptio continua. This placed an…

3 weeks 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 weeks ago

Isolate vs. Dialect Continuum

While language isolates like Basque stand as mysterious linguistic islands with no living relatives, dialect continuums show us how languages…

3 weeks ago

Loanwords vs. Calques

Ever wondered why your French friend says "email" but calls a skyscraper a "gratte-ciel"? Languages borrow from each other in…

3 weeks ago

Grammatical Evaporation

Have you ever wondered why English grammar seems simpler than Latin or German? This phenomenon, known as grammatical evaporation, is…

3 weeks ago

Quantifying a Dialect’s ‘Distance’

How different are two dialects, really? Linguists can now answer that question with surprising precision. Discover the methods used to…

3 weeks ago

The Typo That Survives Extinction

A scribe's error in a single manuscript can be so influential it gets copied for centuries, becoming the "correct" version.…

3 weeks ago

The Logic of Back-Formation: From ‘Editor’ to ‘Edit’

Which came first: the editor or the edit? The answer reveals a fascinating linguistic process called back-formation, where we reverse-engineer…

3 weeks ago

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