Historical Linguistics

Proving Languages Are Related

How can linguists be so certain that English and ancient Sanskrit are cousins, while neighboring Finnish is a total stranger?…

3 weeks ago

Biography of a Word: The Journey of ‘Assassin’

Discover the dramatic history of the word 'assassin,' a term born from a mysterious medieval sect in the mountains of…

3 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…

3 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.…

3 weeks ago

The Press That Froze Language

The invention of the printing press was a revolution not just for knowledge, but for language itself. Before Gutenberg, language…

3 weeks ago

The World’s Most Isolated Languages: A Journey into Linguistic Isolates

While most languages belong to vast family trees, some stand utterly alone. These linguistic isolates, like the mysterious Basque of…

3 weeks ago

The Last Words of Old Prussian: How a Language Was Erased by the Sword

The death of a language is usually a slow fade, but Old Prussian was not so lucky. It was systematically…

3 weeks ago

The Billion-Word Crystal Ball: How Corpus Linguistics Predicts the Future of Language

Ever wonder how new words like 'rizz' make it into the dictionary or why grammar rules seem to change over…

3 weeks ago

Glib, Glim, and Grunt: A Secret History of Thieves’ Cant, the Anti-Language of the Underworld

In the shadowy corners of Renaissance England, a secret language was born out of desperation and defiance. Known as Thieves'…

3 weeks ago

Carved in Stone, Read on the Edge: Unlocking Ogham, Ireland’s Ancient Alphabet of Lines

Forget runes and hieroglyphs; journey to ancient Ireland to uncover Ogham, a script written not on a page but on…

3 weeks ago

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