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Category: Linguistics
What is your opinion on eurasiatic and nostratic theory?
In my last lecture of Historical Linguistics, I brought in a guest lecturer, a fellow PhD student, who was an ardent Nostraticist. I hadn’t discussed Nostratic with him for years. To my astonishment, I watched him recant Nostratic right before my eyes. And the way he did it was by making fun of Starostin et […]
Why is English one of the official languages of India?
Writing this so that lots of other people can correct me. And because I keep passing on Mehrdad’s A2As. 🙂 English is neither the official language of UK, US or Australia. Indeed. The notion of an official language seems to have been ignored in the Anglosphere, simply because they took it as given that the […]
Identify how linguistic is related with historical linguistics?
Well, linguistics is the scholarly discipline whose subject matter is language. Historical linguistics is the scholarly discipline whose subject matter is the development of language through time. It explains language in terms of how it historically developed to get to this point (its diachrony). Up until the 1920s, historical linguistics was the mainstream of linguistics. […]
What is the etymology of “Therasia”?
The Just-So story of antiquity is as Konstantinos Konstantinides put it: Thera the island was named for its colonist Theras, and Therasia for his daughter. Yeah, I find that too convenient too. I’m not looking up Pauly or anything reputable like that, but I will work from the corresponding common nouns. Thēr means a wild […]
Would you give up your mother tongue for a common world language, if you knew that it would unite all people?
Thx4A2A, Irene. I’d say that in Armenian, but my wife doesn’t speak it. 🙁 This is a painful question for me, as I was an Esperantist for a fair while. But even before the Espereantists split about whether the “final victory” was worth messianically waiting for, they were very careful not to convey a message […]
How much does our knowledge of obscure languages depend on missionary work which preserved and exposed them?
Quite a bit. I trained around fieldwork linguists. Which was a colossal mistake for someone working on a European language. But useful if you want to be exposed to typology. I hear the IPA horror stories of my peers here, and blanche. Can linguists differentiate between all the sounds of the IPA? Now. Fieldwork linguists […]
Is it grammatically correct to use “they” as a singular pronoun?
There’s some critical nuance being missed in answers so far (though I strongly suspect it’s come up elsewhere here). The closest is in the sources mentioned by Mark A. Mandel, and the answer given by Matthew Carlson. The old use of singular they is with reference to an non-specific entity, where the use of gender […]
If New Testament has κρεμάμενος “hanged” referring to Jesus, why has the word been rendered as σταυρωθείς, “crucified”?
Well, both do indeed occur in the New Testament. “Crucify” σταυρόω is the usual verb, but Galatians 3:13 uses ὅτι γέγραπται Ἐπικατάρατος πᾶς ὁ κρεμάμενος ἐπὶ ξύλου “for it is written: cursed is he who hangs from a pole.” Galatians 3:13 uses hangs from a pole to refer to Jesus, but in fact it is […]
Do creole languages have one “base language” or two “parent languages”?
It’s a very good question. Normally, creoles and pidgins are put in the too hard basket of linguistic family trees for precisely that reason. It’s very hard to argue for a single parent language, as pidgins, and the creoles that arise from them, really are mixed languages, with grammar from the one, vocabulary from the […]
Is the English “cuz” (because) becoming a clitic?
Not yet in my speech, but you’re pointing out something interesting. If you pronounce them as a single word, cuzall, cuzawesome, yeah, that’s a proclitic, and that’s grammaticalisation. I don’t. I do pronounce ’cause as a single syllable often, many do. That’s a reduction, but I think it’s still independently stressed for me, and it’s […]