historical linguistics

The Great Germanic Sound Shift

Long before English vowels did their famous shuffle, a far more ancient and dramatic event rocked its linguistic family tree.…

3 weeks ago

The Grammar of Nicknames

Ever wonder why William becomes Bill, but not Willam? Or how a Russian Aleksandr affectionately becomes Sashenka? Nicknames follow a…

3 weeks ago

The Comma That Rules a Nation

The U.S. Second Amendment's meaning hinges on a single, hotly debated comma. This grammatical ambiguity has fueled a centuries-long battle…

3 weeks ago

Georgia’s Living Alphabet

At first glance, the Georgian alphabet, Mkhedruli, appears less like a set of letters and more like a collection of…

3 weeks ago

The Press That Froze Language

The invention of the printing press was a revolution not just for knowledge, but for language itself. Before Gutenberg, language…

3 weeks ago

The World’s Most Isolated Languages: A Journey into Linguistic Isolates

While most languages belong to vast family trees, some stand utterly alone. These linguistic isolates, like the mysterious Basque of…

3 weeks ago

The Last Words of Old Prussian: How a Language Was Erased by the Sword

The death of a language is usually a slow fade, but Old Prussian was not so lucky. It was systematically…

3 weeks ago

The Billion-Word Crystal Ball: How Corpus Linguistics Predicts the Future of Language

Ever wonder how new words like 'rizz' make it into the dictionary or why grammar rules seem to change over…

3 weeks ago

Glib, Glim, and Grunt: A Secret History of Thieves’ Cant, the Anti-Language of the Underworld

In the shadowy corners of Renaissance England, a secret language was born out of desperation and defiance. Known as Thieves'…

3 weeks ago

Carved in Stone, Read on the Edge: Unlocking Ogham, Ireland’s Ancient Alphabet of Lines

Forget runes and hieroglyphs; journey to ancient Ireland to uncover Ogham, a script written not on a page but on…

3 weeks ago

This website uses cookies.