Linguistics

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…

6 days ago

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…

6 days ago

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…

6 days ago

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…

6 days ago

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…

6 days ago

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…

6 days ago

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…

6 days ago

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…

6 days ago

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…

6 days ago

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…

6 days ago

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