New Zealand's founding document, the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, exists in two languages—but it tells two different stories. A crucial…
The delightful word 'serendipity' wasn't a happy accident itself, but a deliberate creation by 18th-century writer Horace Walpole. Inspired by…
Before QWERTY conquered the world, the first typewriter prototype had keys arranged in two simple rows like a piano. This…
Ever wonder why German has a word for taking pleasure in someone else's misfortune (*Schadenfreude*), but English doesn't? This post…
Your native language does more than just give you words for "left" and "right"; its very grammar shapes how you…
Why can you count 'chairs' but not 'furniture'? This linguistic puzzle is explained by the mass-count distinction, a fundamental rule…
Imagine being the first outsider to document a language with no written form. How would you create its first-ever dictionary?…
How do we know who "he" is in the sentence "John said he was tired"? While English leaves it ambiguous,…
Ever wondered why you can't say "one rice" in English or "one bread" in Chinese? This post dives into the…
While language isolates like Basque stand as mysterious linguistic islands with no living relatives, dialect continuums show us how languages…
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