Historical Linguistics

The Ezana Stone: Decoding Ethiopia’s Rosetta Stone

Long before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, the Kingdom of Aksum produced the Ezana Stone, a trilingual monument inscribed…

5 days ago

Why China Abandoned the “Latin of the East”

For over two millennia, the Sinosphere was united by a written language completely divorced from spoken speech—a "Latin of the…

5 days ago

Code-Switching on Paper: How Japan “Hacked” Classical Chinese

Japanese scholars spent centuries using Classical Chinese as their formal written language, despite the two languages having completely incompatible grammar…

5 days ago

Why It’s ‘Feet’ Not ‘Foots’: The Logic of I-Umlaut

Why do we say "feet" instead of "foots"? It isn't a random quirk of English grammar, but the result of…

5 days ago

Wit and Git: The Lost Dual Pronouns of Old English

Old English possessed a grammatical rarity called the "dual number", using specific pronouns—*wit* (we two) and *git* (you two)—to refer…

5 days ago

Runic Roots: From the Futhorc to the Letter Thorn

While modern English relies on the Latin alphabet, our language was originally written in the angular, 33-character runic system known…

5 days ago

Karma, Guru, Avatar: The True Meanings of Sanskrit Loans

While we casually use words like 'Avatar' and 'Karma' in daily English, their journey from the ancient Vedas involves a…

5 days ago

The Knight in the Panther’s Skin: A 12th-Century Time Capsule

While English speakers struggle to decipher texts from just 500 years ago, modern Georgians can read their 12th-century national epic…

5 days ago

A Century of Change: Azerbaijani’s 4 Script Swaps

In the 20th century, Azerbaijani speakers were forced to change their official alphabet three times—from Perso-Arabic to Latin, to Cyrillic,…

5 days ago

Cyrillic Persian: Why Tajik Scripts Changed 3 Times

Tajik is the only variety of the Persian language officially written in Cyrillic, a result of turbulent 20th-century Soviet policies…

5 days ago

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