Writing & Scripts

Killing the Verb: How the Telegraph Changed Writing

The telegraph, with its per-word cost, forced writers to perform linguistic surgery, stripping sentences down to their bare essentials. This…

10 months ago

The Emperor’s Alphabet: The Story of Phags-pa Script

In the 13th century, Kublai Khan commissioned a single, official script to unite the vast, multilingual Mongol Empire. The result…

10 months ago

The Scrambled Word: Inside Dysgraphia

Beyond just messy handwriting, dysgraphia is a complex neurological condition that disrupts the linguistic pathway between a thought and the…

10 months ago

The Cuneiform Stylus: The Tool That Wrote the Word

The world's first writing system, cuneiform, owes its distinctive wedge-shaped appearance to a surprisingly simple tool. This post explores how…

10 months ago

Reading Right-to-Left: How Scripts Shape the Brain

Does the direction you read in change how you perceive the world? This article delves into the surprising science of…

10 months ago

The Reader’s Leap: Why Your Eyes Skip Words

Reading feels like a smooth, continuous flow, but your eyes are actually performing a frantic, jerky dance across the page.…

10 months ago

The Alphabet That Failed

In the 1960s, a radical new alphabet for English was born, bankrolled by the will of playwright George Bernard Shaw.…

10 months ago

The Geometry of God: Rules of Islamic Calligraphy

In Islamic art, the graceful curves of calligraphy are not a matter of artistic whim, but of sacred mathematics. This…

10 months ago

The Scribe’s Shortcut: A History of the Tilde (~)

That familiar squiggle, the tilde (~), is more than just a decoration on the Spanish 'ñ' or a casual emoji.…

10 months ago

The Vai Script: A Dreamed-Up Alphabet

In the 1830s, an illiterate Vai man in West Africa named Momolu Duwalu Bukele had a vivid dream where he…

10 months ago

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