Orthography

Reading Without Breaks: The Cognitive Cost of Scriptio Continua

Ancient scripts were often written as an unbroken stream of letters, a practice known as scriptio continua. This placed an…

3 weeks ago

The Typo That Survives Extinction

A scribe's error in a single manuscript can be so influential it gets copied for centuries, becoming the "correct" version.…

3 weeks ago

Hmong’s Tonal Writing System

Discover the Romanized Popular Alphabet (RPA), the ingenious writing system for the Hmong language. In this linguistic deep-dive, you'll learn…

4 weeks ago

Hawaiian and the Phonemic Principle

With only eight consonants and five vowels, the Hawaiian alphabet is a perfect example of the phonemic principle, where each…

4 weeks ago

Why Is Polish So Different From Other Slavic Languages?

Ever wondered why Polish sounds and looks so different from its Slavic cousins like Russian or Czech? From its unique…

4 weeks ago

Cheshirization: The Vanishing Vowel

Named after the Cheshire Cat, Cheshirization is a fascinating phonological process where a vowel vanishes but leaves a ghostly trace…

4 months ago

Fix Your Spelling: 10 Tricky Words

Struggle with words like 'accommodate' or 'liaison'? This foundational guide breaks down 10 of the most commonly misspelled words in…

4 months ago

The Japanese Crossword Puzzle

How do you build a crossword in a language with three writing systems and no spaces? This piece explores the…

4 months ago

The Secret Language of Digital Punctuation

Forget what you learned in grammar school; the internet has its own set of rules for punctuation. From the "aggressive"…

4 months ago

The Art of Omission: Writing Without E

This post explores the lipogram, a daunting form of wordplay where an author intentionally avoids a specific letter—often "e." We'll…

4 months ago

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