The Law of Vowel Harmony
Ever wonder why languages like Turkish or Finnish sound so uniquely melodic? The secret lies in a hidden linguistic rule called vowel harmony, a principle where all the vowels within…
Tag: affix
My Hand, My Self: Inalienable Grammar
In English, you can talk about "a hand" as a detached object. But in many languages, the rules of grammar forbid this, forcing you to say *whose* hand it is.…
The Language of Scrabble: A Game of Morphemes
How do competitive Scrabble players memorize tens of thousands of words? The secret isn't a photographic memory, but a deep understanding of linguistics. Elite players learn words not as wholes,…
The Ghost in the Word: Cranberry Morphemes
What do the "cran" in cranberry and the "luke" in lukewarm have in common? They are "cranberry morphemes"—fossilized word parts that have no independent meaning but haunt our vocabulary. This…
The World’s Lego Languages: How Agglutination Builds Meaning Brick by Brick
This article explores the world of agglutinative languages like Turkish, Finnish, and Swahili, where long, complex words are built by snapping together morphemes like Lego bricks. We deconstruct a few…