Blogs about Language

No post this month; it's been overwhelmingly busy in my personal life. I'm working on a relatively large project documenting three decades of sound change, and I've had a lot less time to devote to …

lingthusiasm:Bonus 76: Linguistic jobs beyond academia | PatreonBonus 76: Linguistic jobs beyond academiaLinguistics professors are some of the most visible career role models that you see if you’re taking courses in linguistics (since they’re teaching …

For a long time during the winter rains this year, I couldn’t go walking in my neighborhood, since I had no way to protect myself (with both hands on my walker) or the walker itself …

In a recent episode of his great podcast Streetwise Hebrew, host Guy Sharett reviews words deriving from the root פקח. He discusses the meaning and usage of such words as:פִּקּוּחַ pikuach - "supervision, inspection"מְפַקֵּחַ mifakeach …

I’ve spent a lot of time editing Wikipedia. I do it for many reasons, but one of the sillier ones floating around the margins of my consciousness is that I like to think that, by …

I figured I was pretty well acquainted with the -nym family, from acronym and backronym to mononym and toponym. (If you need a refresher, see Mike Pope’s 2013 column for the Visual Thesaurus, “What’s in …

1. Academic rumours Careful scholarship is supposed to protect us from chains of whispers, where texts get distorted via paraphrase and summary so that secondary and tertiary works fail to accurately convey the sense of …

Anne was the youngest of the three celebrated Brontë sisters. Born in 1820, she spent most of her life living with her immediate family in Haworth, Yorkshire. Sadly, she died when she was only 29, …

Readers of this blog know that I believe serendipity is a key element of fundamental research. There is something neatly paradoxical about this claim. We might like ‘key elements’ to be plannable so that we …

Today is the first of May, or that's what Shakespeare thought, as did all proper Englishmen. May, for him, ran from May 11th to June 10th. The reason for this is reasonably simple. Ancient folk …

Throughout In most Tuareg varieties, the verb 'be able' is dub-ət (pf. yă-ddob-ăt, impf. ti-dubu-t). There are no compelling cognates for this in Berber outside Tuareg, as Naït-Zerrad's comparative dictionary confirms; at best, one might …

I got this from Avva, and I confess that while I was reading it (in Russian), I assumed it was a rant from relatively recent times — say, my grandfather’s day. Imagine my surprise when …

Yuan (? dynasty (1271-1368) jade seal in the Bristol Museum: https://twitter.com/CraigClunas/status/1666025197118291968 My first impression is that this is derived from ʼPhags-pa or a related script used to write Mongolian or other languages of the Mongol …

Local taste isn’t just about what you like best. It’s about what you like more than everyplace else. While names like Olivia and Liam are favorites from coast to coast, only one state has made …

“So who should be most brassed off by this show?”–Jason Farago, New York Times, June 1, 2023, in reference to “It’s Pablo-Matic,” an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, which he did not like. When I …

The Oxford Languages Department at Oxford University Press is pleased to announce that it will be running a virtual paid summer placement for 2023, which will run for five weeks from Monday 10 July to …

In 1942, the literary critic and Princeton graduate, Edmund Wilson, then forty-seven, made friends with a scholar of Russian literature slightly younger than himself, Helen Muchnic. Born in Baku in 1902, Helen emigrated to the …

I was familiar, in outline, with how Gaia theory got its name: that the novelist William Golding, being well versed in the classics, suggested it to his friend James Lovelock on a walk one day, …

results of a Google search for "luggage"I'm reading Ingrid Paulsen's The emergence of American English as a discursive variety (it's open-access, so you can read it in PDF. But note: it is definitely an academic …

I never meant for the numbering of these posts to have any significance other than to tell them apart, but it’s still gratifying to have hit the century after (checks notes) a mere eleven years …