The Vowel That Saved a Kingdom
In the chaos of medieval Bruges, how could you tell friend from foe? For Flemish rebels in 1302, the answer wasn't a banner but a phrase: "schild en vriend." This…
Unlocking the Universe of Languages
In the chaos of medieval Bruges, how could you tell friend from foe? For Flemish rebels in 1302, the answer wasn't a banner but a phrase: "schild en vriend." This…
Ever wonder why so many people say 'probly' instead of 'probably' or 'libry' instead of 'library'? This common linguistic shortcut isn't a mistake, but a fascinating process called haplology. Discover…
We can read the words of Charlemagne's era, but what did they actually sound like? A groundbreaking initiative called the "Audio-visual corpus of Old German" (AT-ST) is using clues from…
Named after the Cheshire Cat, Cheshirization is a fascinating phonological process where a vowel vanishes but leaves a ghostly trace of its articulation on a neighboring consonant. Like the cat's…
Go beyond familiar consonants and vowels on a journey into the world's phonetic rarities, from the sharp clicks of Southern African languages to the whistled messages that travel across entire…