Unlocking the Universe of Languages
Discover the surprising "orthographic genealogy" that connects the cursive loops of Arabic to the geometric scripts of India. This post analyzes how the ancient Aramaic abjad traveled the Silk Road…
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,…
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…
Long before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, the Kingdom of Aksum produced the Ezana Stone, a trilingual monument inscribed in Ancient Greek, Sabaean, and Ge'ez. This article explores how…
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…
In Ethiopia's vibrant digital spaces, a cultural and linguistic battle is underway. The ancient, elegant Ge’ez script, a cornerstone of national identity, is clashing with the universal convenience of the…
Venture into the ancient Kingdom of Kush to uncover the secrets of the Meroitic script, a unique writing system that we can read but cannot fully understand. This alphasyllabic script,…
Venture beyond the familiar Indo-European languages and discover the ancient Dravidian family of Southern India and Sri Lanka. From the tongue-curling retroflex sounds of Tamil to the "glued-together" grammar of…
How do you type a language with thousands of characters on a keyboard with only a few dozen keys? The ubiquitous QWERTY layout presents a fascinating challenge for non-Latin scripts,…
Ever dreamed of creating your own alphabet? This guide delves into the art and science of script creation, exploring the cognitive principles that make a writing system successful. Learn the…
In the 13th century, Kublai Khan commissioned a single, official script to unite the vast, multilingual Mongol Empire. The result was Phags-pa, a unique, vertically-written alphabet designed to write everything…
Go beyond the iconic "S" shield and discover Kryptonian, Superman's surprisingly detailed constructed language. This deep dive explores how Kryptonian evolved from random squiggles into a linguistically-sound abugida, complete with…
Most of us learn the ABCs and assume all writing works this way, but that's just one piece of the linguistic puzzle. From Arabic's consonant-only script to Hindi's consonant-vowel units,…