comparative method

The Day a Volcano Silenced a Language

In 1815, the catastrophic eruption of Mount Tambora didn't just cause a "year without a summer" across the globe; it…

6 days ago

How a Fish Got Into the Telephone

Why is the Finnish word for 'fish' (kala) so similar to the Hungarian word (hal), despite being spoken 1,500km apart?…

6 days ago

The Man Who Mapped India’s Languages

In 1894, one man embarked on a seemingly impossible quest: to map every language on the Indian subcontinent. Discover the…

6 days 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

Quantifying a Dialect’s ‘Distance’

How different are two dialects, really? Linguists can now answer that question with surprising precision. Discover the methods used to…

1 month 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…

1 month ago

The Birth of Grammatical Gender in PIE

Why is a table feminine in French? The answer is thousands of years old and has little to do with…

1 month ago

Sumerian: The First Written Language

Explore Sumerian, the world's first written language and a fascinating linguistic isolate. Discovered on cuneiform tablets, this ancient tongue challenges…

1 month ago

Why Tocharian Was an Anomaly

Imagine discovering a lost language in Western China that looks far more like Latin or Irish than its immediate neighbors,…

1 month ago

OCS: The First Slavic Literary Language

Before there was Russian, Polish, or Bulgarian, there was their common literary ancestor: Old Church Slavonic. Discover the story of…

1 month ago

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