There has been quite a bit of interest in a series of guest posts by Don Ringe on the early linguistic history of Europe. Yesterday, he sent along another installment, which I've posted below on his behalf, as well as an answer to a question from the comments on an earlier post, which I'll post […]
In response to Don Ringe's recent post on "The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe", David Marjanović asked … is there a way to estimate how much time was available between the initial breakup of PIE and the establishment of sound changes that would make a Wanderwort traceable? I'd expect words like "horse" and "wheel" to […]
In a NYT Op-Ed yesterday, Iain Gately described finding himself at a loss for words in Spanish ("Besotted — Etymologically, That Is", 12/31/2008): I cleared my hangover on Boxing Day by going for a surf at Espasante, near my home in Galicia, northern Spain. […] A fisherman — with Anton, the town pig by his […]
It's Word of the Year season again, and a dark-horse candidate is surging on the inside turn to the home stretch: malus. (OK, well, it appeals to me at least — my poor past record in predicting WOTY choices suggests that my lexical tastes are in the minority.) A press release from the Union Bank […]
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."
Dick Cavett recently called Sarah Palin "The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla" and "the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High". He worries that "ambitious politicos" will learn "that frayed syntax, bungled grammar and run-on sentences that ramble on long after thought has given out completely are a candidate’s valuable traits". Peter Suderman, more specific if less witty, […]
Continuing to follow up on the issues raised by David Brooks' column "Harmony and the Dream", I recommend some interesting reviews by Daphna Oyserman and her colleagues. Among her many publications on culture I found two articles that are especially relevant.
Here's another interview-as-blog-post. This time the interviewer is someone writing a book, who has read some of the Language Log posts linked here and here; and the subject of the interview is "the new fashion for biological determinism in debates about differences between the sexes".
In the (figurative) pages of Slate, Amanda Schaffer and Emily Bazelon have begun a six-part series on "The Sex Difference Evangelists", with four parts so far: Meet the Believers (1 July) Pick a Little, Talk a Little (1 July) Empathy Queens (2 July) Mars, Venus, Babies, and Hormones (3 July) The series focuses on two […]
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Yesterday ("Sexual pseudoscience from CNN", 6/19/2008), I promised to follow up with a discussion of Jennifer Connellan et al., "Sex Differences in Human Neonatal Social Perception", Infant Behavior & Development, 23:113-18, 2000. This post fulfills that promise. But first, I want to say something about the appropriate role of such studies in influencing public opinion […]
The old oppositions between girls and boys — sugar and spice vs. snips and snails — continue to be reinforced and extended in the popular press by sexual pseudoscience. For example, Leonard Sax's false claims about boys' inferior hearing are front and center again in Paula Spencer, "Is it harder to raise boys or girls?", […]
In the case of D. C. v Heller shortly to be decided by the US Supreme Court, the central issue is the meaning of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution: A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall […]
Yesterday, Stefan Valdimarsson wrote to tell me about an interesting error in one of my recent posts. It was a typing error, but not one of the common slips of the finger that have been catalogued, counted and modeled over the decades, from D.D. Lessenberry's 1928 "Analysis of Errors" (published by Corona Typewriters, and reprinted […]