Stuttering John’s Lost Language
In the 10th century, an envoy named John of Gorze adopted a radical language-learning strategy: two years of total silence to master Arabic. But when he finally spoke, he was…
Tag: cognition
The Forbidden Experiment: Feral Children
From an Egyptian pharaoh to a Holy Roman Emperor, history is dotted with cruel attempts to discover humanity's "natural" language by raising children in silence. These "forbidden experiments", along with…
The Fairy Tale Behind ‘Serendipity’
The delightful word 'serendipity' wasn't a happy accident itself, but a deliberate creation by 18th-century writer Horace Walpole. Inspired by a Persian fairy tale about three observant princes who made…
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 is the "what if" story of that forgotten machine and…
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 the Zamenhof family and the first pioneers who transformed a…
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 Deb Roy did just that, wiring his home with cameras…
The Hidden ‘Event’ in Every Verb
Have you ever wondered how a simple action can be described with endless detail? The secret lies in a hidden layer of meaning within every verb, a concept from linguistic…
Deconstructing a Fake Review
Ever wonder if that glowing five-star review is too good to be true? The secrets of deceptive writing are often hidden in plain sight, embedded in the very words and…
Lexical Gaps Across Languages
Ever wonder why German has a word for taking pleasure in someone else's misfortune (*Schadenfreude*), but English doesn't? This post explores these "lexical gaps"—concepts that are easily expressed in one…
Language and Spatial Cognition
Your native language does more than just give you words for "left" and "right"; its very grammar shapes how you perceive, remember, and navigate space. From the distinction between prepositions…
Autohyponymy: The Word Inside
Can a word be a specific type of itself? This article introduces autohyponymy, a fascinating linguistic quirk where words like "dog" can mean both the entire species and just a…
How a Machine Learns to Hear
Go inside your smart speaker and discover how it turns sound into text through the lens of linguistics. Explore the core components of Automatic Speech Recognition, from acoustic models that…
The Power of the Double Letter
Why does Italian have 'pala' (shovel) but also 'palla' (ball)? This phenomenon, known as gemination or consonant doubling, isn't just a spelling quirk. It represents a distinct, longer consonant sound…
Allomorphy: The Chameleon Word
What do the 's' in 'cats', the 'en' in 'oxen', and the vowel change in 'feet' have in common? They are all allomorphs—different forms of the same unit of meaning,…
The Mass-Count Distinction
Why can you count 'chairs' but not 'furniture'? This linguistic puzzle is explained by the mass-count distinction, a fundamental rule that shapes how we talk about everything from objects to…
Syntactic Priming: The Echo
Ever found yourself accidentally copying the sentence structure of the person you're talking to? This isn't a coincidence; it's a fascinating psycholinguistic phenomenon called syntactic priming. Discover the unconscious 'echo'…
Constructing a Field Dictionary from Scratch
Imagine being the first outsider to document a language with no written form. How would you create its first-ever dictionary? From pointing at your nose to defining 'untranslatable' cultural concepts,…
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 on an innate super-memory, but on a sophisticated linguistic scaffolding.…
Logophoricity: The Grammar of Point of View
How do we know who "he" is in the sentence "John said he was tired"? While English leaves it ambiguous, many languages have a secret weapon: logophoricity. This fascinating grammatical…
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 phenomenon, called case syncretism, is a fascinating story of grammatical…