Echolalia: The Function of Repetition
Echolalia, the involuntary repetition of another person's words, has long been misunderstood as a barrier to communication. However, through the lens of Gestalt Language Processing, we can see it as…
Tag: script
The Aras River Divide: One Language, Two Writing Systems
Separated by the Aras River and two centuries of divergent history, the Azerbaijani language exists in a unique sociolinguistic split: one language spoken by millions but written in two completely…
Cyrillic Persian: Why Tajik Scripts Changed 3 Times
Tajik is the only variety of the Persian language officially written in Cyrillic, a result of turbulent 20th-century Soviet policies that saw the script change three times in two decades.…
Stoichedon: The Greek Grid Style of Writing
Discover the "stoichedon" style of Ancient Greece, where inscriptions were carved in perfect, checkerboard-like grids without spaces or punctuation. This article explores how this severe aesthetic reflected Athenian democratic ideals…
Transliteration vs. Transcription: What’s the Difference?
Confused why "Peking" became "Beijing", or why "Quran" is sometimes spelled "Koran"? It all comes down to the linguistic battle between Transliteration (mapping letters) and Transcription (mapping sounds). This post…
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…
1283: Did a King Really Invent the Thai Script?
Tradition holds that King Ramkhamhaeng the Great single-handedly created the Thai writing system in 1283, but does this legend hold up to linguistic scrutiny? We explore the evolution of the…
The Capital “I”: Ego or Typography?
English is the only major language that capitalizes the first-person singular pronoun "I", a quirk that many assume stems from cultural ego. However, the true origin is a practical solution…
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…
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...