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…
Tag: indo-european
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…
The Dravidian Language Family: A South Indian Enigma
Venture beyond the familiar Indo-European languages and discover the ancient Dravidian family of Southern India and Sri Lanka. From the tongue-curling retroflex sounds of Tamil to the "glued-together" grammar of…
Recreating Ötzi the Iceman’s Voice
Scientists have peered into the life of Ötzi the Iceman, learning what he ate and how he died. Now, thanks to CT scans and digital modeling, they have recreated the…
Proving Languages Are Related
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…
The Balkan Sprachbund: A Linguistic Melting Pot
What happens when unrelated languages live side-by-side for centuries? In the Balkans, languages as different as Albanian, Greek, and Romanian started borrowing each other's grammar, creating a unique "Sprachbund"—a linguistic…
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. This was the Great Germanic Sound Shift, a systematic chain…
What Makes Hungarian Difficult to Learn?
Learning a new language always brings about a sense of adventure, introducing the learner to a new culture and way of thinking. However, some languages...