Language
Writing systems, linguistic evolution, speech encoding, language structure, and the historical development of how humans represent and transmit meaning through symbols and sounds.
2 lessons in this category
May 2026
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21 May 4 min
Temple housing ‘eternal flame’ burns down in Japan - NBC News
A temple housing a flame kept burning for over a thousand years has burned down in Japan. This is teachable on multiple levels: how continuous cultural practices are maintained across centuries, the engineering and social systems that keep perpetual flames alive, and what happens when institutional memory meets catastrophic failure.
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09 May 6 min
The Leap from Drawing Things to Drawing Sounds
A 4,400-year-old script shows the design leap from drawing objects to encoding sounds — the hard transition that made alphabets possible.