The Lost Vowels of Proto-Semitic
How do you reconstruct the vowels of an ancient language when its descendants, like Hebrew and Arabic, were written without them? This linguistic detective story reveals how the chance survival…
Tag: comparative method
The Birth of Grammatical Gender in PIE
Why is a table feminine in French? The answer is thousands of years old and has little to do with sex. This article traces the origins of grammatical gender back…
Sumerian: The First Written Language
Explore Sumerian, the world's first written language and a fascinating linguistic isolate. Discovered on cuneiform tablets, this ancient tongue challenges our understanding of grammar with its agglutinative nature and mind-bending…
Why Tocharian Was an Anomaly
Imagine discovering a lost language in Western China that looks far more like Latin or Irish than its immediate neighbors, Sanskrit and Persian. The extinct Tocharian languages presented linguists with…
OCS: The First Slavic Literary Language
Before there was Russian, Polish, or Bulgarian, there was their common literary ancestor: Old Church Slavonic. Discover the story of the language crafted by two missionary brothers, Saints Cyril and…
Hawaiian and the Phonemic Principle
With only eight consonants and five vowels, the Hawaiian alphabet is a perfect example of the phonemic principle, where each letter consistently corresponds to a single sound. This elegant simplicity,…
The Altaic Debate: A Family Feud
Are Turkish, Mongolian, Korean, and Japanese distant cousins? The Altaic hypothesis proposes they descend from a single ancient tongue, but modern linguistics has a different story to tell. Dive into…
Why Korean and Japanese Share Grammar
Are Korean and Japanese related languages? While they feel incredibly similar to learners, the answer from linguists is "no." This uncanny resemblance isn't due to a shared family tree, but…
The Uralic Enigma: A Lost Siberian Homeland
Ever wondered why Finnish and Hungarian sound nothing like their European neighbors? These languages are part of the Uralic family, and their story begins not in Europe, but thousands of…
Why Is Polish So Different From Other Slavic Languages?
Ever wondered why Polish sounds and looks so different from its Slavic cousins like Russian or Czech? From its unique nasal vowels—a precious relic of ancient Proto-Slavic—to a complex spelling…
East vs. West vs. South Slavic: What’s the Difference?
The Slavic languages are a sprawling family, divided into East, West, and South branches. But what does that split actually mean for a learner trying to choose a language, or…
When Did Slavic Languages Separate?
Ever wonder how Polish and Russian, while related, became so different? The story begins with a single language, Proto-Slavic, and a massive migration that split a people and their speech.…
Can Slavic Speakers Understand Each Other?
Can a Pole successfully order a beer in Slovakia? We explore the fascinating world of Slavic mutual intelligibility, testing the limits of understanding between languages like Ukrainian, Serbian, Czech, and…
The Origins of Slavic: A Journey Back in Time
Ever wondered how Russian, Polish, and Croatian can be so different yet so similar? We journey back 1500 years to the marshlands of Eastern Europe to uncover the story of…
The Balto-Slavic Mystery: Are They Siblings or Cousins?
A Lithuanian and a Pole can't understand each other, so why do linguists insist their languages are close relatives? We dive into the ancient Balto-Slavic mystery, exploring the deep grammatical…
Japanese vs. Chinese: Are They Even Related?
At a glance, Japanese and Chinese look incredibly similar due to their shared characters, leading many to believe they are from the same language family. But is this a sign…
The ‘Defective’ Verb: When Grammar Has Gaps
Ever wondered why you can say 'I am running' but not 'I am musting'? These grammatical black holes are the work of 'defective verbs', fascinating linguistic fossils that lack a…
The A-Not-A Question Structure
Many languages, like Mandarin Chinese, form yes-no questions without words for "yes" or "no." Instead, they use the ingenious "A-not-A" structure, which poses a question by presenting both the positive…
Linguistic Taphonomy: Word Decay
Just as paleontologists study fossils to understand ancient life, we can explore the fossils in our own language. Linguistic taphonomy reveals how words and grammar decay over centuries, leaving behind…
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…