1218: Inflection for Proper Nouns Apr 10, 2018
In heavily inflected languages like Kalaallisut (a.k.a West Greenlandic), names change in form where necessary for case. For instance, the capital of Greenland, Nuuk in English, is also 'Nuuk' in the ergative case, but in the locative (i.e. locations like "in Nuuk") becomes 'Nuumi'. This is also true of names for people etc.. With English however, there is a general aversion to modifying proper nouns. Partly this is because case is limited in English, but even where there is case such as the genitive -'s following an [s] or [z] in a coda, the word doesn't change, such as "chris's (dog)". The other reason is that it is conceptually odd; the other common inflectional morphology in English is with the plural, but it is uncommon for there ever to be a plural proper noun. For more on this, see the video about proper nouns out today.
1167: Writing Systems: An Overview Feb 18, 2018
There are many different writing systems from all over the world, used with varying frequency, but not all of these are alphabets. The most obvious example of this may be with pictographic and logographic writing systems (symbols that represent words but aren't images thereof), which aren't alphabets because little to no attempt needs to be made to convey the way that the word sounds. This is why Cantonese and Mandarin (are not mutually intelligible when spoken always, but are written in much the same way. However the list goes on, for instance with abjads, such as for Arabic, Hebrew, and also Tifinagh, Syriac, and ancient Phoenician for which consonants are represented, but not necessarily vowels; Greek and by extension Latin and Cyrillic alphabets are essentially Phoenician but written left-to-right and with the addition of vowels. There are also syllabaries—where a syllable is represented but not the individual sounds—such as for Cherokee or Katakana Japanese. Finally, there are abugidas, which represent consonant-vowel segments; this gives the vowel more prevalence than in an abjad, but not equal status to consonants, such as in an alphabet. Of course, some languages are more suited for certain writing-systems than others, which is why Inuit words look so long written in the Latin script, and but why the Cree abugida (used for some Inuit-Yupik languages) could not be used for Georgian, with its long consonant-clusters.
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1120: Vocalic Assimilation in Kalaallisut Jan 2, 2018
English has plenty of examples of assimilation: when a sound consistently changes due to the phonemic context, i.e. the sounds around (particularly after) it. This can be seen with [n], which becomes [m] before sounds like [p] (e.g. 'impossible' is the negating 'in-' prefix + 'possible), or [t] becoming [t͡ʃ] before [ɹ] (e.g. the sound modified from 'tail to 'trail'). In Kalaallisut (a.k.a. West Greenlandic) this is even more extreme. At first glance it may seem that there are between 5 and 11 vowels, but because of assimilation there are only 3 vocalic phonemes: [a], [i], and [u]. Funnily, the alphabet for Kalaallisut contains 5 vowels—A, E, I, O, and U—but E and O only appear before [R] and [q]. All of the other vowels are allophones of [i], [a] or [u], even though they would be considered separate phonemes in other languages such as English. To see the range of each of these Greenlandic vowels, look at this graph below (citation after the links). You can also support Word Facts on Patreon for more content: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts.
Fortescue, Michael (1990), "Basic Structures and Processes in West Greenlandic", in Collins, Dirmid R. F., Arctic Languages: An Awakening (PDF), Paris: UNESCO, p. 317, ISBN 92-3-102661-5