Historical Linguistics

Paper Literacy vs. Digital Communication

Tweet My aunt keeps everything. Her house had children’s toys and underwear from 120 years ago. I sold her car yesterday, and had to rummage through all the storage spaces to be sure I had gotten everything. I found this rumpled artifact. It instructs the driver to put this in the front or back window […]

Endangered Languages Week

Tweet Did you know this was endangered languages week?  I didn’t, but I’m glad it’s happening.  With all the alarming news that has hogged the headlines over the past few months, endangered languages have sunk to a lower rung of our consciousness, mine anyway.  So it’s time to stop and think for a moment about […]

Brand New Alphabet for Northern Caucasian Languages

Tweet I am copying into this blogpost an email which appeared on the  Language Policy List lgpolicy-list@groups.sas.upenn.edu about the ancient languages of the Caucasus Mountains. I have edited out some parts of it which were technical, in order to make it a tidy size for a blog post, and to make it accessible to non-specialists.  The […]

The modern “you”

Tweet Most of the argument is about the singular “they,” but the singular “you” also has an interesting genesis, and this article in The Economist tells the story, or at least part of the story. The article concludes that social change has brought about this language change, though it does not draw any conclusions about why social […]

The language of guns

Tweet We should watch our gun language. The New York Times has an article today, “In Gun Debate, Even Language Is Loaded,” documenting the pervasive gun references in our language.  I speak six languages, and in thinking about each, I believe the article is correct — we have far more expressions, verbs, and nouns which […]

Linguists and biologist tussle over original language

Tweet An observant British diplomat serving in India, Sir William Jones, observed in the late 18th century that many word roots in Sanskrit matched word roots in Greek and Latin, which led to further linguistics research which ultimately linked a stunningly large group of languages, from English to Finnish, to Sanskrit, all the Latin languages (French, […]

Ignorant politics – Rep. King and Chinese

Tweet Rep. Steve King of Iowa has sponsored an English-only bill in the U.S. House of Representatives. It’s a dumb bill with unstated pernicious goals of racism and exclusion, but leave that aside for the moment. Rep. King said, “A common language is the most powerful unifying force known throughout history, throughout all humanity and […]

Down with English-Only laws

Tweet Once again, English Only legislation is being introduced in the U.S. Congress, this time by Rep. Steve King of Iowa. Given the substantial number of serious problems faced by America now, this legislation should be viewed as a frivolous waste of time, but its deleterious effects go deeper than that. It denigrates and demeans […]

Genetics research confirms earlier linguistics research

Tweet Geneticists, Drs. David Reich of Harvard and Andres Ruiz-Linares of University College London announced today, as was reported in The New York Times (“Earliest Americans Arrived in Waves, DNA Study Finds”), that there were three waves, not one wave, of migration from Siberia which first populated the Americas. DNA has provided enough clues to […]

More on the beginning of language

Tweet At the end of the 19th century, a Xam/San man (we call them “Bushmen”) in South Africa looked at a figure in a prehistoric rock painting and said “That’s a shaman!” (This account taken from The Mind in the Cave, by David Lewis-Williams, published by Thames & Hudson in 2002.) Nobody knows for certain […]