Unlocking the Universe of Languages
The Khmer script of Cambodia holds the Guinness World Record for the world's largest alphabet, with 74 letters spanning consonants, vowels, and diacritics. This post explores its ancient Indian roots,…
Before the 8th century, European handwriting was a chaotic mess of illegible styles that stifled communication. Discover how Charlemagne and his monks standardized writing with "Carolingian Minuscule", the direct ancestor…
In the 19th century, Mormon pioneers in Utah attempted to solve the chaos of English spelling by inventing their own writing system: the Deseret Alphabet. This article explores the linguistic…
Discover the linguistics behind Thaana, the unique writing system of the Maldives, where the alphabet is literally built from numbers. This article explores how Maldivian scholars engineered a script using…
Separated by the Aras River and two centuries of divergent history, the Azerbaijani language exists in a unique sociolinguistic split: one language spoken by millions but written in two completely…
Explore the visual and linguistic allure of Urdu's "hanging" script, Nastaʿlīq. This article delves into why Urdu defies the flat baseline of standard Arabic computer fonts in favor of a…
While Hindi and Urdu rely on completely different writing systems and divergent formal vocabularies—drawing from Sanskrit and Persian respectively—they share an identical grammatical skeleton known as Hindustani. This article explores…
While most of the world writes horizontally, and East Asian scripts traditionally flow vertically from right to left, the traditional Mongolian script is a linguistic anomaly: it is written in…
Confused why "Peking" became "Beijing", or why "Quran" is sometimes spelled "Koran"? It all comes down to the linguistic battle between Transliteration (mapping letters) and Transcription (mapping sounds). This post…
Often overshadowed by the Voynich Manuscript, the Rohonc Codex involves a mysterious book found in Hungary containing nearly 800 distinct characters—far too many for a standard alphabet. While historically dismissed…
Unlike the arbitrary order of the Latin ABCs, the Javanese script (Hanacaraka) is organized into a perfect poem recounting a tragic legend. Discover the story of Aji Saka and his…
Discover the remarkable true story of King Ibrahim Njoya of Cameroon, who invented a writing system from scratch in the late 19th century. This post explores the linguistic evolution of…
Explore the fascinating history of Maltese, the only Semitic language in the European Union and the sole survivor of the extinct Siculo-Arabic dialect. We examine how this unique linguistic fossil…
The invention of writing wasn't just about drawing pictures; it required a massive cognitive leap known as the Rebus Principle. This article explores how ancient scribes discovered that a picture…
Explore the fascinating intersection of linguistics and material science by discovering how the fragile nature of palm leaves dictated the shape of the Odia alphabet. We examine why ancient scribes…
Hindi and Urdu represent a fascinating linguistic paradox: they are mutually intelligible in conversation yet largely incomprehensible to one another in writing. This article explores the history of "Hindustani", the…
Long before the invention of the computer, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy utilized a binary system of white and purple shells to encode their laws and treaties. This exploration of Wampum Belts…
While Western dyslexia is primarily a phonological challenge involving sound-letter mapping, research shows that dyslexia in Chinese functions differently, impacting the brain's visuospatial and motor-memory regions. This post explores the…
Discover the forgotten story of Dr. J. W. P. Davis, a Liberian doctor who invented a unique writing system for the Bassa language in the early 20th century. This tale…
For centuries, the Fula language, spoken by over 40 million people, lacked its own native script. In the 1980s, two teenage brothers in Guinea decided to change that, inventing a…