Matt Viser, Seung Min Kim & Annie Linskey, "Biden plans immediate flurry of executive orders to reverse Trump policies", WaPo 11/7/2020 [emphasis added]: Although transitions of power can always include abrupt changes, the shift from Trump to Biden — from one president who sought to undermine established norms and institutions to another who has vowed […]
Browsing through the The American Heritage Dictionary "Indo-European Roots Appendix", a favorite activity of mine, even before the pandemic lockdowns, I came to "pel-3" and was stunned when I saw that one of the derived words was Greek peltē, a shield (made of hide), about which three years ago I had written a very long […]
Article in The Guardian, "Crooked not courageous: Adani renames Australian group Bravus, mistaking it for 'brave'", by Naaman Zhou (11/5/20): Mining company Adani has changed its name to a Latin word that means “crooked”, “deformed”, “mercenary or assassin”, after mistakenly thinking that it meant “brave”. The controversial mining group, which is responsible for the Carmichael […]
This incredibly fine NHK documentary on "The Iron Road" will only be available online until November 8. Since I do not know whether and in what form it will be available after November 8, I'm including it here only as a link embedded in the title. If anyone discovers that, after November 8, it might […]
Today's xkcd: Mouseover title: "Thank you to Gretchen McCulloch for fielding this question, and sorry that as a result the world's foremost internet linguist has been devoured by the brown one. She will be missed."
If not, what is it? And how and why did people memorize it? Responding to this post, "Memorizing a thesaurus" (10/28/20), Dan Martin remarks: I found some of this discussion rather strange since to a kâvya* expert of the Indian and Tibetan realms (I am not one of them, although I got to hang with […]
In our 1992 chapter "The stress and structure of modified noun phrases in English" (in Sag & Szabolcsi, Lexical Matters), Richard Sproat and I noted that the normal order in English puts a nominal modifier before its head, but "there are some cases where it appears to be necessary to assume that the head of […]
Tweet by Eddie Zipperer: BIDEN: “I’ll lead an effective strategy to mobilize trunalimunumaprzure.” pic.twitter.com/TAkj7bJndN — Eddie Zipperer (@EddieZipperer) October 30, 2020
Recently we have had a string of posts on South Asian linguistic phenomena. Most of the languages involved have been Indic, and will probably continue to be predominantly so during the coming months and years. Consequently, I'm delighted today to make a post about Tamil, a Dravidian language with a glorious heritage. Except where otherwise […]
One of the assignments in ling001 "Introduction to Linguistics" is a Final Project, which is a piece of original linguistic analysis. The results are often excellent, as these examples from five or six years ago indicate. One especially successful example was Jared Fenton's 2014 analysis of "The art of the promo", about the monologues delivered […]