Writing Systems

The Rebus Principle: How Pictures Became Words

The invention of writing wasn't just about drawing pictures; it required a massive cognitive leap known as the Rebus Principle.…

6 days ago

How Palm Leaves Shaped the Odia Script

Explore the fascinating intersection of linguistics and material science by discovering how the fragile nature of palm leaves dictated the…

6 days ago

Hindi and Urdu: Twins Separated by a Script

Hindi and Urdu represent a fascinating linguistic paradox: they are mutually intelligible in conversation yet largely incomprehensible to one another…

6 days ago

Wampum Belts: Diplomacy Woven in Beads

Long before the invention of the computer, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy utilized a binary system of white and purple shells to…

1 week ago

Dyslexia in Logograms: Reading Differences in Chinese

While Western dyslexia is primarily a phonological challenge involving sound-letter mapping, research shows that dyslexia in Chinese functions differently, impacting…

1 week ago

The Doctor Who Invented a Writing System

Discover the forgotten story of Dr. J. W. P. Davis, a Liberian doctor who invented a unique writing system for…

2 months ago

The Adlam Script: A Modern Alphabet for an Ancient People

For centuries, the Fula language, spoken by over 40 million people, lacked its own native script. In the 1980s, two…

3 months ago

Logograms vs. Ideograms: There’s a Difference

Is Chinese a language of "idea-pictures"? Not quite. This common misconception confuses ideograms, which are language-independent symbols for concepts, with…

3 months ago

The Lost Vowels of Proto-Semitic

How do you reconstruct the vowels of an ancient language when its descendants, like Hebrew and Arabic, were written without…

3 months ago

LTR vs RTL: Why We Read The Way We Do

Ever wondered why English is read left-to-right, but Arabic and Hebrew are read right-to-left? The answer is a fascinating journey…

3 months ago

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