Ancient Languages

The Lost Vowels of Proto-Semitic

How do you reconstruct the vowels of an ancient language when its descendants, like Hebrew and Arabic, were written without…

8 hours ago

Walls That Talk: Decoding Ancient Graffiti

Forget stuffy royal decrees. Ancient graffiti offers an unfiltered glimpse into the lives of everyday people, from lovelorn Romans to…

7 days ago

Sumerian: The First Written Language

Explore Sumerian, the world's first written language and a fascinating linguistic isolate. Discovered on cuneiform tablets, this ancient tongue challenges…

7 days ago

Why Tocharian Was an Anomaly

Imagine discovering a lost language in Western China that looks far more like Latin or Irish than its immediate neighbors,…

7 days ago

The Papyrus Revolution: How a Plant Built an Empire

Before the internet, before the printing press, there was papyrus. This humble reed from the Nile wasn't just ancient paper;…

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

The Forbidden Language of the Inca Court

The Inca emperors, divine rulers of a vast Andean empire, held a powerful secret—a language spoken only among themselves. This…

3 months ago

Re-voicing the Past: The AT-ST Project

We can read the words of Charlemagne's era, but what did they actually sound like? A groundbreaking initiative called the…

3 months ago

Latin: The DNA of Modern Science

Far from being a linguistic relic, Latin is the essential operating system for modern innovation. This post moves beyond its…

3 months ago

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