Historical Linguistics

The Lies on the Map: When Placenames Deceive

We trust our maps to tell us the truth, but what if they're lying? From Greenland's icy shores named to…

3 months ago

Words Without Parents: Linguistic Orphans

Every word has a family tree, but what about the "orphan words"—linguistic mysteries like *dog*, *bad*, and *quiz*—that appear in…

3 months ago

The Scytale: Sparta’s Rolling Cipher

Long before digital encryption, the ancient Spartans secured their military secrets with a simple but ingenious device: the Scytale. This…

3 months ago

The Cold War’s Translation Engine

The powerful translation tools we use daily weren't born from a desire to share poetry, but from the urgent need…

3 months ago

The Uncracked Minoan Code: Linear A

We can read the sounds of the ancient Minoan script, Linear A, but we have no idea what the words…

3 months ago

The Mountain of Tongues: The Caucasus Sprachbund

The Caucasus region, a "Mountain of Tongues", is home to a dizzying array of unrelated languages. Yet, through centuries of…

3 months 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 months 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 months 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 months 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 months ago

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