Quizzes

Five questions on how scripts and language families trace back to common ancestors, from the Greek alphabet's two divergent descendants to Hangul's uniquely documented invention.

Five questions on how, where and by whom the world's major scripts were invented, adapted and, in a few genuinely unresolved cases, never yet read.

Five questions on how confidently linguists can reconstruct a family tree, from the Uto-Aztecan and Turkic branches to the still-open question of Niger-Congo's own unity.

The scholars whose careers built comparative and descriptive linguistics, from the first reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European to the classification methods still argued over today.