Category: General Language

The way I did it, which may not work everywhere, is: Take as many breadth subjects in linguistics as you can, while doing your degree in another faculty. Demonstrate through charm and wit and intellect that you would be an asset to the linguistics department. If at all possible, do a cross disciplinary postgraduate degree […]

It’s a pillar of semiotics that you can’t: Ferdinand de Saussure’s renowned Arbitrariness of the Sign (Arbitraire du Signe). Sound symbolism is an exception to the Arbitrariness of the Sign, and it’s an exception that Saussure was aware of, and addressed (see http://personal.bgsu.edu/~dcalle… quoting his Course): it’s a marginal exception, and as signs become conventional […]

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Which language is older, Persian or Arabic? There’s no such thing as an older language. Similarly, there is no such thing as an older dialect. Sure, for example, the English of England has been spoken in the same place for 1500 years. But the English of America retains a bunch of […]

In the case you raise of count, this is simply Assimilation (phonology). It’s not that the m and the n are interchangeable, it’s that nt is easier to pronounce that mt, because both the n and the t are alveolar, so you do not have to move your tongue and lips between the two sounds; […]

Complimentary, but not deep. The interwebs widely quote Chomsky saying in Kolkata, in a 10-minute speech in 2001, “The first generative grammar in the modern sense was Panini’s grammar”: An event in Kolkata. Chomsky in fact already said that in the preface of Aspects in 1965: “a generative grammar, in essentially the contemporary sense of […]

Well, let’s think this through. I count three programming paradigms from when I was studying computer science 25 years ago: functional, logical, and procedural. They correspond to three types of semantics: denotational, axiomatic, and operational. The first two are pristine and beautiful articulations of mathematics and logic, respectively. The last involves modelling the internal state […]

There are languages with clean, atomic, nuggety units of meaning as separate words: isolating languages like Chinese and (mostly) English. There are languages with suffixes as well as words, where those suffixes are still, for the most part, clean, atomic, easy to detect, and easy to take apart: agglutinative languages like Turkish. And then you […]

Dictionary Typology This presentation offers the following typology of dictionaries: Bilingual/Multilingual (translating one language into another) Monolingual Synchronic (contemporary usage) Limited (a particular field, e.g. medical; a particular register, e.g. slang) General: Comprehensive (all of the language, multi-volume) or Standard (single volume, mostly for paedagogical use) Diachronic Historical (the historical paths that words have taken […]

I am much more of a functionalist than Daniel Ross and Brian Collins, so I am much more sympathetic to unidirectionality, and the fact that there are counterexamples does not bother me. It did bother Brian Joseph, who’s one of the big names against unidirectionality, and who also marked my thesis. He found it pretty […]