comparative method

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…

9 hours ago

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…

1 week ago

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…

1 week ago

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,…

1 week ago

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…

1 week ago

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…

1 week ago

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…

1 week ago

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…

1 week ago

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,…

1 week ago

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…

1 week ago

This website uses cookies.