We’ve all heard of "false friends"—words that look the same in different languages but mean different things. But what about…
Why do Japanese arigatō and Portuguese obrigado sound so similar? While it's tempting to invent a story of ancient contact,…
While many words degrade, some do the opposite in a process called amelioration. This post explores the linguistic glow-up of…
We trust our maps to tell us the truth, but what if they're lying? From Greenland's icy shores named to…
Every word has a family tree, but what about the "orphan words"—linguistic mysteries like *dog*, *bad*, and *quiz*—that appear in…
Long before digital encryption, the ancient Spartans secured their military secrets with a simple but ingenious device: the Scytale. This…
The powerful translation tools we use daily weren't born from a desire to share poetry, but from the urgent need…
We can read the sounds of the ancient Minoan script, Linear A, but we have no idea what the words…
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…
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