The First Family of Esperanto
L. L. Zamenhof may have invented Esperanto, but he didn't bring it to life alone. This is the story of the Zamenhof family and the…
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The Dictionary’s Phantom: Story of ‘Dord’
What happens when a word that doesn't exist appears in the dictionary? For thirteen years, the non-word 'dord' lived in the pages of Webster's Second…
The Dad Who Taped 90,000 Hours of Baby Talk
What if you could record every moment of your child's life to understand how they learn to talk? MIT researcher Deb Roy did just that,…
When Grammar Breaks Free: A Look at Excorporation
Excorporation is a rare linguistic process where a grammatical piece, once bound inside a larger word, "escapes" to become an independent word itself. We explore…
The Hidden ‘Event’ in Every Verb
Have you ever wondered how a simple action can be described with endless detail? The secret lies in a hidden layer of meaning within every…
Gradual vs. Abrupt Creolization
How are new languages born from scratch? This article explores the fascinating debate over creolization, contrasting the "abrupt" theory, where children create language in one…
Deconstructing a Fake Review
Ever wonder if that glowing five-star review is too good to be true? The secrets of deceptive writing are often hidden in plain sight, embedded…
Tone Spreading in African Languages
Ever wonder how a single word can have multiple meanings based only on its melody? This post explores "tone spreading", a fascinating process in many…
Lexical Gaps Across Languages
Ever wonder why German has a word for taking pleasure in someone else's misfortune (*Schadenfreude*), but English doesn't? This post explores these "lexical gaps"—concepts that…
Language and Spatial Cognition
Your native language does more than just give you words for "left" and "right"; its very grammar shapes how you perceive, remember, and navigate space.…
Autohyponymy: The Word Inside
Can a word be a specific type of itself? This article introduces autohyponymy, a fascinating linguistic quirk where words like "dog" can mean both the…
How a Machine Learns to Hear
Go inside your smart speaker and discover how it turns sound into text through the lens of linguistics. Explore the core components of Automatic Speech…
The Power of the Double Letter
Why does Italian have 'pala' (shovel) but also 'palla' (ball)? This phenomenon, known as gemination or consonant doubling, isn't just a spelling quirk. It represents…
Allomorphy: The Chameleon Word
What do the 's' in 'cats', the 'en' in 'oxen', and the vowel change in 'feet' have in common? They are all allomorphs—different forms of…
The Mass-Count Distinction
Why can you count 'chairs' but not 'furniture'? This linguistic puzzle is explained by the mass-count distinction, a fundamental rule that shapes how we talk…
Mednyj Aleut: A Hybrid Tongue
Mednyj Aleut is a rare "mixed language" from the Commander Islands that defies typical linguistic classification. It was created by a community of mixed Russian-Aleut…
Syntactic Priming: The Echo
Ever found yourself accidentally copying the sentence structure of the person you're talking to? This isn't a coincidence; it's a fascinating psycholinguistic phenomenon called syntactic…
Tech for Documenting Language
Forget the weathered notebook and tape recorder. Modern linguists are deploying a high-tech toolkit to document endangered languages, using portable ultrasound to image the tongue…
A History of Parentheses
We use them every day to add an aside or crack a digital smile, but have you ever wondered where parentheses come from? From their…
High vs. Low-Context Cultures
Ever felt your directness was seen as rudeness, or that someone's polite "maybe" was actually a firm "no"? This communication gap can be explained by…