Unlocking the Universe of Languages
The Khmer script of Cambodia holds the Guinness World Record for the world's largest alphabet, with 74 letters spanning consonants, vowels, and diacritics. This post explores its ancient Indian roots,…
Before the 8th century, European handwriting was a chaotic mess of illegible styles that stifled communication. Discover how Charlemagne and his monks standardized writing with "Carolingian Minuscule", the direct ancestor…
Echolalia, the involuntary repetition of another person's words, has long been misunderstood as a barrier to communication. However, through the lens of Gestalt Language Processing, we can see it as…
Separated by the Aras River and two centuries of divergent history, the Azerbaijani language exists in a unique sociolinguistic split: one language spoken by millions but written in two completely…
Tajik is the only variety of the Persian language officially written in Cyrillic, a result of turbulent 20th-century Soviet policies that saw the script change three times in two decades.…
Discover the "stoichedon" style of Ancient Greece, where inscriptions were carved in perfect, checkerboard-like grids without spaces or punctuation. This article explores how this severe aesthetic reflected Athenian democratic ideals…
Confused why "Peking" became "Beijing", or why "Quran" is sometimes spelled "Koran"? It all comes down to the linguistic battle between Transliteration (mapping letters) and Transcription (mapping sounds). This post…
The Indus Valley Civilization left behind magnificent ruins and thousands of mysterious seals featuring a "unicorn" and short strings of symbols. Despite modern AI and linguistic analysis, this ancient script…
Tradition holds that King Ramkhamhaeng the Great single-handedly created the Thai writing system in 1283, but does this legend hold up to linguistic scrutiny? We explore the evolution of the…
English is the only major language that capitalizes the first-person singular pronoun "I", a quirk that many assume stems from cultural ego. However, the true origin is a practical solution…
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is the gold standard for writing down sounds, but its origins are surprisingly humble. Discover the story of Paul Passy and the 19th-century language teachers…
Ancient scripts were often written as an unbroken stream of letters, a practice known as scriptio continua. This placed an immense cognitive load on the reader, forcing their brain to…
While most of China uses Chinese characters, the Yi people of the southwest have their own unique writing system with a history spanning centuries. Once a complex logographic script used…
What if the letter 'S' looked like a hiss or 'P' was shaped by the lips? We delve into the Pasilalinic-sympathetic Alphabet, a 19th-century utopian project to create a universal…
Discover the Fraser alphabet, a remarkable script for the Lisu language where letters are ingeniously rotated to represent different sounds. Created by missionary James O. Fraser and his collaborators, this…
At first glance, the Georgian alphabet, Mkhedruli, appears less like a set of letters and more like a collection of elegant, dancing vines. This beautiful script is the modern face…
Long before English dominated global trade, the language of the Sogdians, an Iranian people from Central Asia, connected the great empires of the East and West. This is the story…
In the diverse world of linguistics, few tales are as captivating and mysterious as the story of Enochian, reputedly the language of angels. Delving into...