On the web site of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in the "Early Edition" section, is an article by Mark Pagel, Quentin D. Atkinson, Andreea S. Calude, and Andrew Meade: "Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia". The authors claim that a set of 23 especially frequent words can be […]
The great Indo-Europeanist Calvert Watkins passed away in his sleep on the evening of March 20. From the Harvard Gazette: Calvert Watkins, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Linguistics and the Classics, emeritus, died earlier this month at the age of 80. A towering figure in historical and Indo-European linguistics and a pioneer in the […]
As soon as I heard that the 5th edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (AHD) had come out, I rushed to the nearest Barnes & Noble bookstore (yes, they still exist — that was Borders that closed) and plunked down two Bens (hundred dollar bills) to buy three copies at $60 […]
There was a cute "Things Kids Write" piece in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago (James Courter, "Teaching Taco Bell's Canon", 7/9/2012), with the subhead "Today's students don't read. As a result, they have sometimes hilarious notions of how the written language represents what they hear." Is it true that college students today […]
Since Westerners first encountered Chinese characters centuries ago, they have been confused over how the characters convey meaning. It was obvious from the beginning that the characters are very different from a simple syllabary in that they do not directly and unmistakably signify the sounds of whole syllables on a one-for-one basis; all the more, […]
To answer the many critics of his "whites have become black" diatribe, the Tudor historian and obnoxious TV personality David Starkey published an article in The Telegraph on August 19 defending his stance on the way Jamaican linguistic patterns are allegedly implicated in the cause of the English riots. The linguistically relevant point is that […]
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My previous post was about "dialects" that are often not really dialects, but bona fide languages, and the efforts of the Chinese government to phase them out. In this post, I'll be talking about "etymology" that is not really etymology, but character analysis. The occasion for these ruminations (see especially the last two paragraphs below) […]
Following on the announcement of the death of my dear friend Ellen Prince (here), I'm now passing on three further death announcements from recent days: sociolinguist Faye Vaughn-Cooke and lexicographers Fred Mish and Sol Steinmetz.
Could that famously well-edited publication be the source of one of those sporadic folk-etymologies that we call eggcorns? Sure: see "And every lion tongue cast down", 8/1/2005. The mistake discussed there is more of a mondegreen, but it involves the same sort of creative mis-hearing. However, the example that Ian Leslie sent in this morning, […]
As reported by Der Spiegel and picked up by the New York Times blog The Lede, two German cartographers have created The Atlas of True Names, which substitutes place names around the world with glosses based on their etymological roots. It's a very clever idea, but in execution it enshrines some questionable notions of "truth."
Robert James Hargrave has pointed out to Language Log that several regional councils in England are prohibiting their employees from using "elitist" Latinate phrases like "bona fide" or "vice versa" The Daily Telegraph has an article about it. I quote: Bournemouth Council, which has the Latin motto Pulchritudo et Salubritas, meaning beauty and health, has […]
This is a bit late for National Punctuation Day (September 24), but the book wasn't published until October 2: On the Dot: The Speck that Changed the World, by Alexander Humez and Nicholas Humez (Oxford University Press). It's a celebration of the dot ("the smallest meaningful symbol that one can make with ink from a […]
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A couple of days ago, I tried to answer a journalist's questions about nonplussed ("Nonplussed about nonplussed", 8/6/2008). I wasn't entirely satisfied with one of my answers, and so I've tried again today.