The Sadesan Hoax: A Language That Never Was
In the early days of the internet, a mysterious language called Sadesan appeared, promising a lost branch of the Indo-European family tree. But this convincing tongue, complete with a complex…
Unlocking the Universe of Languages
In the early days of the internet, a mysterious language called Sadesan appeared, promising a lost branch of the Indo-European family tree. But this convincing tongue, complete with a complex…
Ever wonder why it's 'chai' in Moscow but 'tea' in London? The answer lies not in a dictionary, but on a map of ancient trade. Discover how the overland Silk…
We can read the words of Charlemagne's era, but what did they actually sound like? A groundbreaking initiative called the "Audio-visual corpus of Old German" (AT-ST) is using clues from…
While English speakers use 'sir' or 'ma'am', many languages embed respect directly into their grammar. This post explores the fascinating honorific systems of Japanese, Korean, and Javanese, where changing a…
Could a nearly extinct language from Siberia be related to Navajo and other Native American languages? The fascinating Dené-Yeniseian hypothesis proposes a direct linguistic link across the Bering Strait, telling…
Ever wonder how linguists estimate when languages like Spanish and French split from their common ancestor? The answer lies in a controversial method called glottochronology, which acts like a "carbon…
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…
Long before English vowels did their famous shuffle, a far more ancient and dramatic event rocked its linguistic family tree. This was the Great Germanic Sound Shift, a systematic chain…
While most languages belong to vast family trees, some stand utterly alone. These linguistic isolates, like the mysterious Basque of Spain or the endangered Ainu of Japan, have no known…
The Hebrew Bible was not written in a single moment, and the language itself is a key to unlocking its layered history. By exploring the field of Biblical philology, we…
Over several millennia, a wave of migration spread a single language family from West-Central Africa to cover nearly the entire southern half of the continent. This was the Bantu Expansion,…
How did one language family colonize a third of the planet, from Madagascar to Easter Island? The answer lies in a revolutionary piece of technology—the outrigger canoe—and an even more…
Imagine a language that vanished over 5,000 years ago, leaving behind no written records. This is Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the mysterious ancestor of English, Russian, Hindi, and hundreds of other tongues.…
Linguistics, in the simplest sense, is the study of languages. But what happens when the language itself has been lost to time, when there are...