language history

The Ghost Vowels of French: How Silent Letters Shape Pronunciation

Why does French have so many letters that aren't pronounced? Far from being useless spelling relics, these "ghost" letters are…

4 months ago

Herein, Aforesaid, Notwithstanding: Why Legal Language Is a Language of Its Own

Have you ever felt lost reading a contract full of words like "aforesaid" and "notwithstanding"? This is "legalese," a unique…

4 months 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…

4 months 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…

4 months ago

From Chariots to Covenants: The Linguistic Archaeology of the Hebrew Bible

The Hebrew Bible was not written in a single moment, and the language itself is a key to unlocking its…

4 months ago

The Great Bantu Migration: How a Language Family Shaped Half a Continent

Over several millennia, a wave of migration spread a single language family from West-Central Africa to cover nearly the entire…

4 months ago

The Whispering Road: How Sogdian Became the Lingua Franca of the Silk Road

Long before English dominated global trade, the language of the Sogdians, an Iranian people from Central Asia, connected the great…

4 months ago

The Ultimate Ancestor: How Linguists Reconstructed the Proto-Indo-European Language

Imagine a language that vanished over 5,000 years ago, leaving behind no written records. This is Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the mysterious…

4 months ago

Punctuation Reimagined: Hervé Bazin’s Linguistic Innovations

Hervé Bazin (1911-1996), a famous French writer and essayist, is known not only for his literary contributions but also for…

2 years ago

Where is Esperanto Spoken?

Esperanto, the most successful constructed international auxiliary language, was invented in the late 19th century by L. L. Zamenhof with…

2 years ago

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