Historical Linguistics

The Whispering Road: How Sogdian Became the Lingua Franca of the Silk Road

Long before English dominated global trade, the language of the Sogdians, an Iranian people from Central Asia, connected the great…

4 months ago

Reading the Landscape: How Forgotten Languages Are Fossilized in Place Names

What if the map on your wall was a Rosetta Stone, holding the key to forgotten languages and ancient migrations?…

4 months ago

The Euphemism Treadmill: Why We Can’t Stop Inventing New Words for Old Taboos

Ever wonder why we have a dozen words for the toilet? This is the "euphemism treadmill," a linguistic cycle where…

4 months ago

The Language of Salt: How a Single Commodity Carved Paths Across the Lexicon

Long before refrigeration, salt was a mineral so valuable that Roman soldiers were paid in it, giving us the word…

4 months ago

The Character with a Secret History: How a Roman Scribble Became the Ampersand

The ampersand (&) is more than a simple stand-in for "and"; it's a linguistic fossil with a secret history. This…

4 months ago

The Language of the Sea: How Maritime Pidgin Shaped Global Communication

Long before English dominated global communication, the world's oceans were a linguistic laboratory where sailors, merchants, and pirates forged simplified…

4 months ago

The Ultimate Ancestor: How Linguists Reconstructed the Proto-Indo-European Language

Imagine a language that vanished over 5,000 years ago, leaving behind no written records. This is Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the mysterious…

4 months ago

A Word to Name the Unspeakable: Raphael Lemkin and the Creation of “Genocide”

Discover the powerful story of Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust and created a…

4 months ago

The Mystery of Rongorongo: Easter Island’s Enigmatic Script

Rongorongo, the written script of the native Rapanui people of Easter Island, stands as one of the most intriguing and…

2 years ago

Old Hungarian Runes: An Insight into Magyar Prehistory

Introduction The Old Hungarian script, often termed as "runic" due to its superficial resemblance to the Germanic runes, offers a…

2 years ago

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