Articles in the Language Stories series
In the 10th century, an envoy named John of Gorze adopted a radical language-learning strategy: two years of total silence…
Discover the forgotten story of Dr. J. W. P. Davis, a Liberian doctor who invented a unique writing system for…
In 1815, the catastrophic eruption of Mount Tambora didn't just cause a "year without a summer" across the globe; it…
For decades, a mysterious call has echoed through the Pacific—a single voice at a frequency no other whale uses. This…
The phrase "Hello, World!" is more than just the first program most coders write; it's a universal rite of passage…
The delightful word 'serendipity' wasn't a happy accident itself, but a deliberate creation by 18th-century writer Horace Walpole. Inspired by…
L. L. Zamenhof may have invented Esperanto, but he didn't bring it to life alone. This is the story of…
What happens when a word that doesn't exist appears in the dictionary? For thirteen years, the non-word 'dord' lived in…
Which came first: the editor or the edit? The answer reveals a fascinating linguistic process called back-formation, where we reverse-engineer…
Did you know the Cyrillic alphabet wasn't invented by a man named Cyril, or even by a Russian? The script…
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