The Teachers Who Invented Scientific Speech
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is the gold standard for writing down sounds, but its origins are surprisingly humble. Discover the story of Paul Passy and the 19th-century language teachers…
Tag: script
Reading Without Breaks: The Cognitive Cost of Scriptio Continua
Ancient scripts were often written as an unbroken stream of letters, a practice known as scriptio continua. This placed an immense cognitive load on the reader, forcing their brain to…
The Yi Script: China’s Living Logogram
While most of China uses Chinese characters, the Yi people of the southwest have their own unique writing system with a history spanning centuries. Once a complex logographic script used…
The Pasilalinic-sympathetic Alphabet
What if the letter 'S' looked like a hiss or 'P' was shaped by the lips? We delve into the Pasilalinic-sympathetic Alphabet, a 19th-century utopian project to create a universal…
The Alphabet of the Hills: The Fraser Script
Discover the Fraser alphabet, a remarkable script for the Lisu language where letters are ingeniously rotated to represent different sounds. Created by missionary James O. Fraser and his collaborators, this…
Georgia’s Living Alphabet
At first glance, the Georgian alphabet, Mkhedruli, appears less like a set of letters and more like a collection of elegant, dancing vines. This beautiful script is the modern face…
The Whispering Road: How Sogdian Became the Lingua Franca of the Silk Road
Long before English dominated global trade, the language of the Sogdians, an Iranian people from Central Asia, connected the great empires of the East and West. This is the story…
Speaking with Angels: The Enochian Language
In the diverse world of linguistics, few tales are as captivating and mysterious as the story of Enochian, reputedly the language of angels. Delving into...