ancient greece

The Language That Clings to the Past: Sorbian

Deep within modern Germany, a Slavic language called Sorbian holds onto a grammatical feature lost by almost all others: the…

3 weeks ago

How to Invent an Alphabet

Ever dreamed of creating your own alphabet? This guide delves into the art and science of script creation, exploring the…

3 weeks ago

The Little Star: A History of the Asterisk (*)

Look at your keyboard. Tucked above the number 8 is a symbol we see every day, yet rarely think about:…

3 weeks ago

The Vanishing ‘We Two’: The Lost Grammar of the Dual

You know singular and plural, but what about a third option? Many languages, from Ancient Greek to modern Slovene, once…

3 weeks ago

Verner’s Law: The Glitch in the System

Grimm's Law neatly explains many sound changes from ancient Proto-Indo-European to Germanic languages, but puzzling exceptions remained a mystery for…

3 weeks ago

Clay, Papyrus, Vellum: How Writing Surfaces Shaped Language

Before keyboards or even paper, the very material a scribe wrote on dictated our linguistic conventions. From the wedge-shaped efficiency…

3 weeks ago

The Mind Palace: The Linguistics of Memory

While memory palaces seem like a visual trick, their true power lies not in the images themselves, but in the…

3 weeks ago

Digging for Words: Linguistic Paleontology

How can we know what prehistoric people talked about without any written records? The answer lies in linguistic paleontology, a…

3 weeks ago

The Invention of Silence: When Words Got Spaces

For centuries, Western texts were written as an unbroken wall of letters, a practice known as scriptio continua. The simple…

3 weeks ago

The Language of the Stars: Decoding Astronomy

Have you ever wondered why the star Betelgeuse has an Arabic name but sits in a Greek constellation? The night…

3 weeks ago

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