Linguistic Typology

Know Your Type: A Language Learning Hack

Is your target language a "Lego" language or a "sculpture" language? This practical framework introduces language typology (isolating, agglutinative, fusional)…

4 months ago

The Rhythm of Speech: Stress-Timed vs. Syllable-Timed Languages

Ever wonder why English sounds rhythmically different from Spanish or Japanese? The answer lies in a fascinating linguistic concept: the…

4 months ago

Go Buy Bring Come: The Logic of Serial Verbs

In languages from Thailand to Ghana, you can say "go buy bring the book" and be perfectly grammatical. This fascinating…

4 months ago

The Language of Sensation: Exploring Ideophones

We all know onomatopoeia, but many languages have something far richer: ideophones. These "adverbs of the senses" don't just mimic…

4 months ago

North of My Foot: Languages Without ‘Left’ and ‘Right’

Imagine a world without 'left' or 'right,' where you'd say "there's a bug on your south leg." This post explores…

4 months ago

Counting in Base-20: A World Beyond Ten

Why do we count in tens? While it seems natural, many cultures from the Mayans to the Basques developed sophisticated…

4 months ago

The Balkan Sprachbund: A Linguistic Melting Pot

What happens when unrelated languages live side-by-side for centuries? In the Balkans, languages as different as Albanian, Greek, and Romanian…

4 months ago

Why You Can’t Just “Count” in Thai

Ever tried to say "two dogs" in Thai and been corrected? That's because you can't just count nouns; you need…

4 months ago

The One-Word Sentence: A Deep Dive into Polysynthetic Languages

In languages like Inuktitut or Mohawk, a single, complex word can convey a thought that requires a full sentence in…

4 months ago

Classifying Reality: The Social Impact of Noun Classes and Grammatical Gender

Beyond the simple "he/she/it" of English, many languages categorize the world in ways that are deeply tied to culture and…

4 months ago

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