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 rare dual number. This unique way of speaking, which distinguishes…
Tag: ancient greece
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 cognitive principles that make a writing system successful. Learn the…
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: the asterisk (*). From marking a password field to bleeping…
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 had a dedicated grammatical form for exactly two of something—the…
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 decades. This post explores Verner's Law, the brilliant discovery that…
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 of cuneiform on clay tablets to the long, flowing sentences…
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 language we use to build and describe them. At its…
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 fascinating science that reconstructs ancient words to reveal the culture,…
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 invention of adding spaces between words wasn't just a typographic…
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 sky is a living museum of linguistic history, preserving ancient…
The Greek Language War: A Nation’s Identity Crisis
For over a century, Greece was torn apart by a linguistic civil war, a battle fought not with weapons but with words. This post delves into the intense conflict between…
The Character with No Sound
Before it was the linchpin of your email address, the @ symbol was a character without a sound, a silent mark on the page. This is the secret history of…
Proving Languages Are Related
How can linguists be so certain that English and ancient Sanskrit are cousins, while neighboring Finnish is a total stranger? It's not guesswork—it's a rigorous scientific process called the comparative…
Naming the Enemy: The Linguistics of Disease
The names we give diseases, from the ancient 'malaria' (bad air) to the clinical 'COVID-19,' are never just labels. They are linguistic artifacts that reveal our scientific understanding, our cultural…
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
Have you ever felt a longing for a place you've never been, or the bittersweetness of a fleeting moment you couldn't describe? This post explores "The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows,"…
Georgia’s Living Alphabet
At first glance, the Georgian alphabet, Mkhedruli, appears less like a set of letters and more like a collection of elegant, dancing vines. This beautiful script is the modern face…
The Shape of Nothing: How the Invention of ‘Zero’ Was a Linguistic and Mathematical Revolution
The concept of zero is more than just a number; it’s a profound linguistic and philosophical idea that had to be invented. This journey traces the word and symbol for…
A Word to Name the Unspeakable: Raphael Lemkin and the Creation of “Genocide”
Discover the powerful story of Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust and created a new word to name the unspeakable. By combining the Greek…
Seeing Blue: How the Language You Speak Changes Your Perception of Color
Do you see the same "blue" as a Russian speaker, who has two distinct words for the color? The fascinating link between language and color perception reveals that our vocabulary…
Old Hungarian Runes: An Insight into Magyar Prehistory
Introduction The Old Hungarian script, often termed as “runic” due to its superficial resemblance to the Germanic runes, offers a fascinating insight into the early...