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 as "Hapax Legomena", present a fascinating puzzle for linguists translating…
Tag: corpus linguistics
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 explores how Latin "errors" like *speclum* (instead of *speculum*) defied…
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 revealed it actually had a close relative. This post explores…
Heterograms & Isograms: Words with Unique Letters
Explore the linguistic and mathematical fascination behind heterograms and isograms—words where no letter is ever repeated. This article delves into how these unique lexical oddities are not just vocabulary trivia,…
Rohonc Codex: Hoax or Hungarian History?
Often overshadowed by the Voynich Manuscript, the Rohonc Codex involves a mysterious book found in Hungary containing nearly 800 distinct characters—far too many for a standard alphabet. While historically dismissed…
Proto-Elamite: The World’s Oldest Unsolved Code
Contemporary with the famous Sumerian cuneiform, Proto-Elamite is a 5,000-year-old script from ancient Iran that remains almost entirely undeciphered. This blog explores the linguistic challenges of cracking a code that…
The Quick Brown Fox: A History of Pangrams
Explore the fascinating linguistic history of pangrams, from the ubiquitous "Quick Brown Fox" to the brain-twisting quest for the perfect 26-letter sentence. This post dives into the constraints of language,…
The Indus Script: The Unicorn Seal Mystery
The Indus Valley Civilization left behind magnificent ruins and thousands of mysterious seals featuring a "unicorn" and short strings of symbols. Despite modern AI and linguistic analysis, this ancient script…
Zipf’s Law: The Mathematical Mystery of Words
Why does the most common word in a language appear exactly twice as often as the second most common one? Discover Zipf's Law, the bizarre mathematical power law that governs…
39 Letters of Faith: The Story of the Armenian Alphabet
Travel back to 405 AD to discover how the monk Mesrop Mashtots engineered the 39-letter Armenian alphabet to save a nation from assimilation. We explore the linguistic genius behind the…
Inside the Dainu Skapis: The Cabinet That Saved a Language
Discover the incredible history of the Dainu skapis, a 19th-century card catalog built by Krišjānis Barons that houses over 200,000 Latvian folk songs. Learn how this massive "proto-database" of oral…
Eco-Linguistics: Does Climate Shape Speech?
Does the landscape dictate how we speak? The "Acoustic Adaptation Hypothesis" suggests that languages in hot, leafy jungles favor vowels to cut through the humidity, while dry, open terrains allow…
The Dolch List: 220 Words You Need to Read
The Dolch List consists of 220 high-frequency "sight words" that comprise up to 75% of all juvenile reading material. This article explores the linguistic history behind the list, explaining why…
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 epic story of Sir George Grierson and the Linguistic Survey…
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…
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…
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…
Tech for Documenting Language
Forget the weathered notebook and tape recorder. Modern linguists are deploying a high-tech toolkit to document endangered languages, using portable ultrasound to image the tongue in motion and photogrammetry to…
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,…
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 quantify the "lexical distance" between language varieties, including the powerful…