language reconstruction

How a Fish Got Into the Telephone

Why is the Finnish word for 'fish' (kala) so similar to the Hungarian word (hal), despite being spoken 1,500km apart?…

9 months ago

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…

10 months ago

The Forbidden Language of the Inca Court

The Inca emperors, divine rulers of a vast Andean empire, held a powerful secret—a language spoken only among themselves. This…

1 year ago

The Sadesan Hoax: A Language That Never Was

In the early days of the internet, a mysterious language called Sadesan appeared, promising a lost branch of the Indo-European…

1 year ago

Re-voicing the Past: The AT-ST Project

We can read the words of Charlemagne's era, but what did they actually sound like? A groundbreaking initiative called the…

1 year ago

Cheshirization: The Vanishing Vowel

Named after the Cheshire Cat, Cheshirization is a fascinating phonological process where a vowel vanishes but leaves a ghostly trace…

1 year ago

Language Carbon Dating: The Science of Glottochronology

Ever wonder how linguists estimate when languages like Spanish and French split from their common ancestor? The answer lies in…

1 year ago

Proving Languages Are Related

How can linguists be so certain that English and ancient Sanskrit are cousins, while neighboring Finnish is a total stranger?…

1 year ago

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.…

1 year 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…

1 year ago

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