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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Why Are There Different Languages?—Response to Vyvyan Evans (Part 4, C...

Dec 3, 2015 by

Why Are There Different Languages?—Response to Vyvyan Evans (Part 4, Conclusion)

[Many thanks to Martin W. Lewis and Johanna Nichols for insightful discussions of some of the issues considered in this post.]   As discussed in the previous post, Vyvyan Evans advocates an alternative to the so-called saltationist...

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Universal Grammar, Neanderthals, and the Evolution of Language—Respons...

Dec 1, 2015 by

Universal Grammar, Neanderthals, and the Evolution of Language—Response to Vyvyan Evans (Part 3)

[Many thanks to Martin W. Lewis and Matthew Jobin for insightful discussions of some of the issues considered in this post.]   The next set of objections to the Universal Grammar (UG) theory raised by Vyvyan Evans concerns its...

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Hungary’s Rising Hyper-Nationalist Jobbik Party and the Legacy of Anti...

Nov 18, 2015 by

Hungary’s Rising Hyper-Nationalist Jobbik Party and the Legacy of Anti-Semitism and Anti-Gypsyism

[Note to Readers: Today’s news that the Hungarian government decided not to place special labels on products from the West Bank and the Golan Heights, as reported by the Jerusalem Post, came as somewhat a surprise, particularly...

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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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Using Grammar to Identify Language Relatedness

Oct 22, 2015 by

Using Grammar to Identify Language Relatedness

[Note: This post is aimed mostly at my current students, but comments from other readers are welcome as well. It is in a way a “prequel” to the mini-series, starting here.]   Most textbook that discuss language families and how such...

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