Writing & Scripts

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…

3 weeks 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…

3 weeks 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…

3 weeks 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…

3 weeks 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.…

3 weeks 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.…

3 weeks 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…

3 weeks 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.…

3 weeks 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…

3 weeks ago

The Scribe’s Mistake: Errors in Medieval Texts

Before the printing press, every book was a handmade original, and every scribe made mistakes. Far from being mere blemishes,…

3 weeks ago

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