Subscribe to Blog via Email
January 2025 M T W T F S S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
Category: General Language
In the globalized digital world, how meaningful is the criteria of geographic proximity to define a sprachbund?
… A very good question, Clarissa! On the one hand, not much, because English is in every household, though the telly and the interwebs. Now, where to find evidence for this? Journalistic Greek is awash with ill-fitting calques from English, and syntactic loans and semantic field readjustments too, because the journalists spend their time reading […]
Why does NACLO use “living” languages in some of its questions?
http://nacloweb.org This is a more general question: why would linguistic Olympiads and competitions in general use for their puzzles real, non-obscure languages, which someone among the the contestants may already know? I know nothing about NACLO in particular, and I will offer some speculation which I still think relevant. Oversight: “meh, noone will know Turkish”. […]
Is there an inverse relationship between social mobility and prevalence of formality in language?
I have been invoked by Heinrich Müller, and I corroborate him. Sociolinguistics, after all, is sociology. (Vote #1: Heinrich Müller’s answer to Is there an inverse relationship between social mobility and prevalence of formality in language?) The classic study of formality and social level is Labov’s “4th floor” study, in 1966 New York. Or should […]
If I want to work in linguistic typology, which linguists should I read?
My top 3: Joseph Greenberg. The founding father. And very useful to get a sense of the kinda functionalist programme he had in mind. Bernard Comrie. Martin Haspelmath. Answered 2017-02-02 · Upvoted by Steve Rapaport and Eric Meinhardt [Originally posted on http://quora.com/If-I-want-to-work-in-linguistic-typology-which-linguists-should-I-read/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
Will swear words become used so much that they will be normal and not rude eventually?
Deadwood (TV series) is celebrated as being one of the most foulmouthed shows on cable TV. This was a conscious decision by the scriptwriters, to convey the impression that 1870s foul language would have had on its contemporaries. Because using actual 1870s foul language (which was blasphemous rather than scatological) would have sounded so anodyne […]
Why are there so many languages in the world?
Originally Answered: Why are there several languages in the world? Firstly, because we are not even sure that there was monogenesis of language. That is, we are not sure whether language originated in a single contiguous community of humans, or multiple communities. Second, because like all social phenomena, language is a dynamic system subject to […]
How is a sign identified as a letter, a picture, and a number?
For pictures, we hope for extreme iconicity. Writing systems often originate in pictures, but end up looking quite abstract and conventional. That applies even to Chinese. So if you have a lot of symbols, and only a few of them look like animals, you can conclude that the ones that look like pictures really are […]
How do linguists determine whether a language is agglutinative or it has postpositions?
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Urdu/Postpositions Well, let’s generalise the question (though I don’t know Urdu well enough). This is not going to be a complete answer btw, and I’ll ask for help from others. What is the difference between a preposition and a prefix, or a postposition and a suffix? That one is a word, and the second is […]
Why are irregular “to be”s quite different?
The reasons for the striking irregularities of the copula verb in Indo-European are addressed in Did the present indicative forms of the Latin verb “esse” evolve from two different roots? As those answers show, the Proto-Indo-European verb was in fact almost regular. But there is a broader question of why the copula in particular is […]
How can I become a field linguist and/or a historical linguist?
First part, you get the PhD. Margaret FalerSweany has got that covered. Expect to have to do at least one postdoc too. Now the fun part. How do you become an academic. Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is your personal experience with obtaining a linguistics degree? Did you run into any unexpected issues? Apart from […]