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How people speak, write and persuade, and how languages are born, change and fade. Start with what language is, then follow it into writing, from clay tablets to the alphabet, and on to the craft of rhetoric and story.
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Start here
The note that answers the topic’s biggest question, then the two it leads to most directly.
Start here
Language is a shared system of rules for combining sounds, signs or symbols into meanings without limit. What sets human language apart from animal calls, and how children learn it.
Graphite8 min read
Then
A language family is a group of languages descended from one common ancestor, the way English, Hindi and Russian all descend from Proto-Indo-European. How linguists prove it.
Graphite7 min read
And then
The alphabet came from Semitic-speaking workers in Egypt about 1900–1700 BC, who used Egyptian pictures for the first sounds of their own words. Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans did the rest.
Graphite7 min read
Every note
The three above, then the rest. Each answers one question and links to the notes it leads to.
The International Phonetic Alphabet is a set of symbols with one symbol for each speech sound, used to write any language's pronunciation exactly. How to read it, symbol by symbol.
Graphite7 min read
Cuneiform is the wedge-shaped script pressed into clay in ancient Mesopotamia from about 3300 BC, the earliest known writing. How it grew out of accounting, and how it was read again.
Graphite7 min read
The Rosetta Stone is a slab carved in 196 BC with one decree in three scripts, hieroglyphic, Demotic and Greek. The Greek gave scholars the key to reading Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Graphite7 min read
Most Chinese characters aren't pictures. They pair a part that hints at meaning with a part that hints at sound. How that works, what radicals are, and how many you need.
Graphite7 min read
Sanskrit is the classical language of ancient India, the language of the Vedas and of Panini's grammar, and a sister of Latin and Greek rather than their mother.
Graphite7 min read
Latin is dead only in one sense: no one learns it from birth. Spoken Latin turned into the Romance languages, and written Latin carried on in church, science and law.
Graphite6 min read
Esperanto is a language L. L. Zamenhof designed in 1887 as an easy second language for everyone. How its regular grammar works, who speaks it, and why it never took over.
Graphite7 min read
Rhetoric is the art of persuasion: finding the arguments, character and feeling that move a particular audience. How ethos, pathos and logos work, shown in the Gettysburg Address.
Graphite7 min read
The hero's journey is a story pattern Joseph Campbell described in 1949: a hero leaves home, is tested in a strange world and returns changed. Its stages, and the case against it.
Graphite7 min read
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