Historical Linguistics

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

Gradual vs. Abrupt Creolization

How are new languages born from scratch? This article explores the fascinating debate over creolization, contrasting the "abrupt" theory, where…

6 days ago

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…

6 days ago

A History of Parentheses

We use them every day to add an aside or crack a digital smile, but have you ever wondered where…

6 days ago

The Unwritten Archive: Linguistics of Oral Traditions

Before writing, societies preserved immense libraries of knowledge within the human mind. The "unwritten archive" of oral tradition wasn't based…

1 month ago

Case Syncretism: When Grammar Gets Efficient

Ever wondered why 'you' is the same whether you're doing the action or receiving it, unlike "I" and "me"? This…

1 month ago

Reading Without Breaks: The Cognitive Cost of Scriptio Continua

Ancient scripts were often written as an unbroken stream of letters, a practice known as scriptio continua. This placed an…

1 month ago

How a Phoneme is Born

Language sounds are always in flux, but where do new ones come from? This article explores the fascinating linguistic process…

1 month ago

Isolate vs. Dialect Continuum

While language isolates like Basque stand as mysterious linguistic islands with no living relatives, dialect continuums show us how languages…

1 month ago

Loanwords vs. Calques

Ever wondered why your French friend says "email" but calls a skyscraper a "gratte-ciel"? Languages borrow from each other in…

1 month ago

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