Unlocking the Universe of Languages
Ever wondered why English says "eleven" and "twelve" instead of "oneteen" and "twoteen"? These irregular numbers are linguistic fossils from an ancient Germanic counting system meaning "one left over" and…
Discover the linguistics behind Thaana, the unique writing system of the Maldives, where the alphabet is literally built from numbers. This article explores how Maldivian scholars engineered a script using…
Among Germanic languages, Danish stands alone with a counting system that seems more like a math riddle than a vocabulary list. This article demystifies the infamous Danish base-20 system, explaining…
Discover Oulipo, the French literary group that combines mathematics and writing to prove that strict constraints are the key to true creativity. From novels written without the letter "e" to…
Explore the linguistic and mathematical fascination behind heterograms and isograms—words where no letter is ever repeated. This article delves into how these unique lexical oddities are not just vocabulary trivia,…
Contemporary with the famous Sumerian cuneiform, Proto-Elamite is a 5,000-year-old script from ancient Iran that remains almost entirely undeciphered. This blog explores the linguistic challenges of cracking a code that…
When is a billion not a billion? This article explores the linguistic tug-of-war between the "Short Scale" (used in the US and UK) and the "Long Scale" (used in Continental…
Explore the fascinating linguistic history of pangrams, from the ubiquitous "Quick Brown Fox" to the brain-twisting quest for the perfect 26-letter sentence. This post dives into the constraints of language,…
Why does the most common word in a language appear exactly twice as often as the second most common one? Discover Zipf's Law, the bizarre mathematical power law that governs…
Humans possess an innate ability called "subitizing", which allows us to instantly recognize quantities up to four without counting. This blog post explores how this cognitive limit shaped early grammar…
"This sentence is false." It is a simple statement that traps logic in an infinite loop: if it's true, it's false, and if it's false, it's true. Explore the history…
What if '27' wasn't an abstract number, but a specific place on your body like 'the other-side little finger'? Journey to New Guinea to explore the fascinating logic of body-part…
We think of mathematics as a universal language, but its vocabulary tells a surprisingly human story of global exchange. From the Arabic word for 'reuniting broken parts' that gave us…