Unlocking the Universe of Languages
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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...