Why Dante Is the Father of the Italian Language
Long before Italy was a unified nation, its people spoke a mosaic of regional dialects, with prestigious Latin reserved for the elite. Dante Alighieri, the master poet, made a revolutionary…
Unlocking the Universe of Languages
Long before Italy was a unified nation, its people spoke a mosaic of regional dialects, with prestigious Latin reserved for the elite. Dante Alighieri, the master poet, made a revolutionary…
While English readily borrows words, Icelandic takes a different path, deliberately creating new terms from its Old Norse roots. This practice, known as linguistic purism, gives us poetic words like…
English and German are sibling languages, but like any family, they have their misunderstandings. This article explores "false friends"—deceptive words like gift/Gift and hell/hell that evolved from a common Germanic…
Every word has a family tree, but what about the "orphan words"—linguistic mysteries like *dog*, *bad*, and *quiz*—that appear in our language with no known parents? This post delves into…
Ever feel like you're being judged not on what you say, but *how* you say it? You're not imagining it. This is the world of "linguistic capital", where our accents,…
In the 1960s, a radical new alphabet for English was born, bankrolled by the will of playwright George Bernard Shaw. Designed to be perfectly logical and efficient, the Shavian alphabet…
What happens when a language preserved in a 1,000-year-old time capsule re-encounters its rapidly evolved cousin? The meeting of Icelandic and Norwegian is a story of linguistic shock, mutual incomprehension,…
The invention of the printing press was a revolution not just for knowledge, but for language itself. Before Gutenberg, language was a fluid, evolving entity, but the press acted as…
Most people may be surprised to learn that there are two Norwegian languages: Bokmål and Nynorsk. Not dialects, mind you, but officially recognized and taught...