Why can you count 'chairs' but not 'furniture'? This linguistic puzzle is explained by the mass-count distinction, a fundamental rule…
Mednyj Aleut is a rare "mixed language" from the Commander Islands that defies typical linguistic classification. It was created by…
Ever found yourself accidentally copying the sentence structure of the person you're talking to? This isn't a coincidence; it's a…
Forget the weathered notebook and tape recorder. Modern linguists are deploying a high-tech toolkit to document endangered languages, using portable…
We use them every day to add an aside or crack a digital smile, but have you ever wondered where…
Ever felt your directness was seen as rudeness, or that someone's polite "maybe" was actually a firm "no"? This communication…
Imagine being the first outsider to document a language with no written form. How would you create its first-ever dictionary?…
Have you ever mastered vowel harmony, only to find another layer of rules? Enter labial harmony, the fascinating system in…
Before writing, societies preserved immense libraries of knowledge within the human mind. The "unwritten archive" of oral tradition wasn't based…
How do we know who "he" is in the sentence "John said he was tired"? While English leaves it ambiguous,…
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