The Teachers Who Invented Scientific Speech
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…
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A Computer Learns ‘Amo, Amas, Amat’
Long before AI could write a poem, the pioneers of computational linguistics took on a monumental task: teaching a room-sized computer grammar. This is the…
The Keyboard That Looked Like a Piano
Before QWERTY conquered the world, the first typewriter prototype had keys arranged in two simple rows like a piano. This is the "what if" story…
The Scholar Who Built a National Epic
Meet Elias Lönnrot, the 19th-century Finnish physician who traveled thousands of kilometers on foot and ski to collect the fading oral poems of his people.…
The Sound Forged by Fire: Welsh’s ‘LL’
The Welsh 'll' is more than just a tricky sound for language learners; it's a voiceless fricative with a deep history, represented by the IPA…
How ‘Spinster’ Became an Insult
The word 'spinster' didn't always evoke images of a lonely old maid. It originally meant a woman who spun thread for a living—a respected and…
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…
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…