Linguistic Typology

The Inward Breath: The World of Implosive Sounds

While most consonants are made by pushing air out, a fascinating category of sounds called implosives does the exact opposite.…

4 months ago

The Real Difference Between Chinese and Korean

At a glance, Chinese and Korean can seem related due to their geographic proximity and shared vocabulary. However, these two…

4 months ago

One Idea, Many Mouths: A Global Idiom Tour

Instead of focusing on one language, this post takes universal concepts—like heavy rain or a revealed secret—and explores the wildly…

4 months ago

The Middle Voice: Neither Active nor Passive

We're all familiar with the active voice ("I wash the car") and the passive voice ("The car is washed"). But…

4 months ago

Are There Any Absolute Language Universals?

For decades, linguists have searched for features shared by all 7,000+ human languages, a quest for a "Universal Grammar." But…

4 months ago

What’s the Hardest Romance Language to Learn?

While most language learners ask about the easiest Romance language, we're flipping the script to find the toughest. From the…

4 months ago

The Two Pasts of Bulgarian: Witnessed vs. Unwitnessed

In most languages, the past is simply the past. But in Bulgarian, your grammar forces you to specify your source:…

4 months ago

How Hungarian Builds Words: The Agglutinative Engine

Explore the beauty of Hungarian, a language that builds incredibly long words by 'gluing' suffixes together in a process called…

4 months ago

The Georgian Verb: A Sentence in One Word

Ever wondered if you could fit an entire sentence into a single word? In the ancient and beautiful Georgian language,…

4 months ago

The Sound of ‘Th’: A Rare Phoneme

The "th" sounds in "think" and "that" feel utterly ordinary to English speakers, but they are linguistic superstars on the…

4 months ago

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