The Caucasus region, a "Mountain of Tongues", is home to a dizzying array of unrelated languages. Yet, through centuries of…
Deep within modern Germany, a Slavic language called Sorbian holds onto a grammatical feature lost by almost all others: the…
Discover the fascinating story of how Romance languages created their adverbs. The Latin word for "mind", *mens*, gradually fused with…
Latin once expressed complex passive ideas with a single word, like amor for "I am loved". This post explores how…
Journey back to medieval Spain to uncover the story of Mozarabic, the lost Romance language of Christians living under Muslim…
Why do the French say 'four-twenties' for 80? This linguistic quirk is a fascinating relic from a base-20 counting system…
Journey to the ABC islands to discover Papiamento, the unique Creole language that sings with the rhythms of its history.…
Ever wonder why the Spanish word for 'rain' is *lluvia* when its Latin ancestor was *pluvia*? This transformation is no…
While Norwegian is a Germanic language, centuries of contact have left it with linguistic "ghosts" from the indigenous Sami languages.…
The telegraph, with its per-word cost, forced writers to perform linguistic surgery, stripping sentences down to their bare essentials. This…
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