June, 2012

The History of Language

Tweet School is out in most places, so I will spend the summer posting about background subjects, with or without exercises to go with them. I’ll write for a while about where language comes from, and more specifically, where English comes from. On a recent trip to the Dordogne region of France, a group of […]

The jumbled-up conditional, er, modals

Tweet My French textbook, French Reference Grammar (1993), has an index entry for the “conditional,” and in the section devoted to it, calls it “the mood of verbs tied to a condition.” My Greek grammar, Greek: A Comprehensive Grammar of the Modern Language (1997) also has a section on the conditional mood. My English grammar, […]

Funny language

Tweet As I head off for a few weeks in California (during which I will post from time to time, as I find interesting things to write about), I leave you with a smile on your face. Let’s begin with an homage to Yogi Berra, a Hall of Fame baseball player (and founder of a […]