comparative method

Intercomprehension: Reading Languages You Don’t Know

Can a Spanish speaker read Portuguese without ever studying it? Discover the linguistic power of "Intercomprehension", a method that unlocks…

5 days ago

Hapax Legomenon: The Mystery of Unique Words

What happens when a word appears only once in the entire written history of a language? These unique occurrences, known…

5 days ago

The 7th Case: Why Ukrainian Retains the Vocative

While many Slavic languages have simplified their grammar over the centuries, Ukrainian has steadfastly retained the Vocative case—the "7th case"…

5 days ago

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

Meet Ў: The Letter Only Found in Belarusian

Discover the "Short U" (Ў), a unique Cyrillic character found exclusively in the Belarusian alphabet. We explore the linguistics behind…

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

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

The ‘Ə’ Factor: How Azerbaijani Differs from Turkish

While Turkish and Azerbaijani are mutually intelligible linguistic cousins, they are far from identical. This deep dive explores the defining…

5 days ago

The Appendix Probi: When ‘Bad’ Latin Won

Discover the *Appendix Probi*, a 3rd-century list of "mistakes" that unintendedly documented the birth of the Romance languages. This article…

5 days ago

The Lemnos Connection: Etruscan’s Long-Lost Cousin

While Etruscan has long been considered a mysterious "language isolate", the discovery of the Lemnos Stele in the Aegean Sea…

5 days ago

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