The Diacritics Affair

Oct 19, 2016 by

The Diacritics Affair

[This is a guest post, written by Roger Fernàndez from Barcelona, Spain] Can a few simple accents become the center of a controversy that occupy headlines? In Catalonia, yes. Catalan is the language of this northeast Spain region,...

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Is Yiddish to Be Traced to Turkey?

Apr 29, 2016 by

Is Yiddish to Be Traced to Turkey?

[Thanks to Leni Silberman for originally drawing my attention to one of the media reports, and to Antonia Cavendish, Maria Soukhanova, Anna Dybo, Peter Shalen, Razib Khan, and Martin Lewis for helpful discussions.]   In the past few...

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Brittany, Another Independence-Seeking European Region

Nov 18, 2015 by

Brittany, Another Independence-Seeking European Region

[Note to Readers: This post was originally published in January 2014.] Brittany in northwestern France is one of several regions in Europe that is seeking increased autonomy, if not complete independence, and instructive parallels...

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Teaching Breton Language at Harvard

Nov 18, 2015 by

Teaching Breton Language at Harvard

[Note to Readers: this post was originally published in September 2013.] In an op-ed piece entitled “What You (Really) Need to Know,” published in the New York Times in January 2012, Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard...

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Napoléon Bonaparte: Frenchman, Corsican, Italian, or Moor?—And the Las...

Oct 30, 2015 by

Napoléon Bonaparte: Frenchman, Corsican, Italian, or Moor?—And the Last of the Romanovs

[This post was originally posted in July 2012.] While population genetics typically focuses on migration and settlement patterns of relatively large groups of people, sometimes a genetic signature of just one person tells an...

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Meeting Darwin’s Last Challenge: Matching Genes, Languages, and Geogra...

Oct 4, 2015 by

Meeting Darwin’s Last Challenge: Matching Genes, Languages, and Geography (Part 3)

In my previous posts (see here and here), I have analyzed Svetlana Burlak’s critique of Longobardi et al. (2015), posted on the Генофонд.рф website. The second critical response posted there is by geneticist Oleg Balanovsky (“Two...

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