Historical Linguistics

The Kazakh Alphabet Switch: A Nation’s Identity

Kazakhstan is undertaking a monumental linguistic and cultural shift, transitioning its national script from Cyrillic to Latin. This deep dive…

1 week ago

The Pasilalinic-sympathetic Alphabet

What if the letter 'S' looked like a hiss or 'P' was shaped by the lips? We delve into the…

1 week ago

Linguistic Taphonomy: Word Decay

Just as paleontologists study fossils to understand ancient life, we can explore the fossils in our own language. Linguistic taphonomy…

1 week ago

The Tangut Script: A Lost Empire’s Code

Uncover the story of the Tangut script, a complex writing system that looks like Chinese but is entirely different. Created…

1 week ago

Digitizing the Dead Sea Scrolls: An OCR Puzzle

Teaching a computer to read is simple, but what if the text is a 2,000-year-old, fragmented manuscript written in an…

1 week ago

Two Tongues, One Soul: The Hindi-Urdu Divide

While speakers from Delhi and Lahore can converse with ease, their national languages, Hindi and Urdu, are officially distinct. This…

3 months ago

Ancient Graffiti: Curses & Complaints

Forget sterile museum displays of emperors and epic battles. The true, unfiltered history of humanity is scrawled on the walls…

3 months ago

Why Is English Spelling So Weird?

Ever wonder why 'knight' has a 'k' or 'island' has an 's'? The answer isn't that English is illogical, but…

3 months ago

The Sailor Who Mistook a Word for an Island

Explore the strange case of "I-da-no", a phantom island that appeared on Japanese maps for decades. This wasn't a sailor's…

3 months ago

The Interrobang’s Brief, Glorious Life

What do you get when you combine a question mark and an exclamation point? In the 1960s, frustrated ad man…

3 months ago

This website uses cookies.