Category: General Language

Per Illocutionary act  and What is an illocutionary act? , it’s always been messy. One take is: The illocutionary act is a speech act: something that the speaker does by speaking. It often expresses an intention that the world matches what the speaker says—that their assertions are accurate, their promises sincere, their commands obeyed. But […]

There is indeed Foreign accent syndrome . And the simplest explanation is the easiest: people wake up with a kind of speech disorder, which listeners match to whatever accents they are familiar with. It does not mean they are speaking a different languages, or that they have been exposed to another accent natively. Pareidolia, the […]

Logan R. Kearsley has written a comprehensive answer on one angle. I will throw a hint on another angle: if you have enough Noun Incorporation (linguistics)  and polysynthesis at a language, you’re going to end up with languages where what European languages treat as nouns or adjectives usually end up as affixes—so what look like […]

*Probably* not. Language change is influenced by several things, in both a conservative and a innovative direction. Input from older versions of the languages demonstrably has an effect in holding back language change — or at least, in promoting use of the older version’s features in parallel. Outright reversing language change doesn’t happen that often, […]

There’s lots of these—Modern Greek from Ancient Greek, Russian from Old Church Slavonic—but I’m not aware of a generic term. In Greek. for example, these are referred to as learnèd loans (λόγιο δάνειο)—but a learned loan in English is a loan from Latin, not Old English. (In fact we do have a term for learned […]

As a card-carrying linguist (even though they don’t pay me to be one), I am of course honour-bound to repudiate any claims of better or worse grammar. There is just more formal and less formal grammar, and you use the appropriate register and grammar in the appropriate circumstances. And “proper” grammar is quite improper in […]

Very, very good question, and I don’t know if I will answer it satisfactorily. Yes, language evolves, and yes, particular features of language are “naturally selected” because they count as an improvement. The catch is that humans have conflicting criteria for what is desirable in human language. These seem to result in an equilibrium: languages […]

I’ll quote what someone else in that position said (originally posted about on my blog: .sig quoting Marcel Cohen, corrected; see also Language Regained). Marcel Cohen was a Jewish author writing in French. His first language was Judaeo-Spanish (aka Djudio, Ladino), which he barely remembered as an adult. As a one-off, he wrote a memoir […]