France’s Base-20 Math Problem
Why do the French say 'four-twenties' for 80? This linguistic quirk is a fascinating relic from a base-20 counting system that has puzzled language learners for generations. We delve into…
Tag: latin
The Invention of Silence: When Words Got Spaces
For centuries, Western texts were written as an unbroken wall of letters, a practice known as scriptio continua. The simple invention of adding spaces between words wasn't just a typographic…
Parsing the Unparsable: The Dhaasanac Language
Journey to the Omo Valley to meet the Dhaasanac people of Ethiopia, whose language defies easy categorization. Instead of marking nouns for their role, Dhaasanac bundles subject and object markers…
The Making of a Nation’s Voice: How Italy Chose Its Language
When Italy became a nation in 1861, a famous statesman declared, "We have made Italy. Now we must make Italians." A crucial part of that project was language, as less…
Biography of a Word: The Journey of ‘Assassin’
Discover the dramatic history of the word 'assassin,' a term born from a mysterious medieval sect in the mountains of Persia. Journey with Marco Polo as he spreads their sensational…
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 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 Spain or the endangered Ainu of Japan, have no known…
The World’s Most Mysterious Book: Can Linguistics Ever Decipher the Voynich Manuscript?
Filled with otherworldly plants and an indecipherable script, the 15th-century Voynich Manuscript has stumped cryptographers for over a century. Linguistic analysis reveals that the text mimics the statistical patterns and…
The Euphemism Treadmill: Why We Can’t Stop Inventing New Words for Old Taboos
Ever wonder why we have a dozen words for the toilet? This is the "euphemism treadmill," a linguistic cycle where our polite words for taboo subjects inevitably become tainted by…
The Language of Salt: How a Single Commodity Carved Paths Across the Lexicon
Long before refrigeration, salt was a mineral so valuable that Roman soldiers were paid in it, giving us the word "salary." This single commodity seasoned our language as much as…
The Character with a Secret History: How a Roman Scribble Became the Ampersand
The ampersand (&) is more than a simple stand-in for "and"; it's a linguistic fossil with a secret history. This ubiquitous symbol began as a quick ligature by Roman scribes…
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 ancestor of English, Russian, Hindi, and hundreds of other tongues.…
The History of the French Circumflex
The French language, renowned for its fluidity and musicality, is adorned with a variety of diacritical marks that contribute to its phonetic, etymological, and aesthetic...