A Guide to the Perplexed: How to Identify Pseudo-Linguistic Articles i...

Nov 8, 2015 by

A Guide to the Perplexed: How to Identify Pseudo-Linguistic Articles in the Media

[The title of this post is inspired by the title of a famous work by one of my favorite scholars of all time, Moshe ben Maimon, aka Maimonides, an extremely influential Jewish philosopher, astronomer, Torah scholar, and physician....

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

Oct 1, 2015 by

Meeting Darwin’s Last Challenge: Matching Genes, Languages, and Geography (Part 2)

In the previous post, I began to analyze Svetlana Burlak’s critique of Longobardi et al. (2015), posted on Генофонд.рф website. As I pointed out, the idea that grammar is a better indicator of language relatedness finds new support...

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

Sep 29, 2015 by

Meeting Darwin’s Last Challenge: Matching Genes, Languages, and Geography (Part 1)

[Note: this is the first post of a three-part mini-series on this issue of genes, languages, and geography.] In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin conjectured that “the cultural transmission and differentiation of languages over...

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Slavs and Their Languages—Reconciling Genetics and Linguistic Findings...

Sep 8, 2015 by

Slavs and Their Languages—Reconciling Genetics and Linguistic Findings

[Thanks to Martin Lewis for helpful discussions, for crafting the passages from our book cited below, and for excellent editorial comments on earlier drafts of this post.]   A recent article by a team of scholars led by Oleg...

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Is It Spanish Pronunciation “As It Is Meant To Be”?

Sep 4, 2015 by

Is It Spanish Pronunciation “As It Is Meant To Be”?

[Thanks to David Benkof for bringing this issue to my attention and for the great discussion that ensued.]   A recent New York Times article titled “Arizona News Anchor Is Drawn Into Debate on Her Accent and the Use of Spanish”...

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The New Kurdish Language Project at Manchester

Jul 19, 2015 by

The New Kurdish Language Project at Manchester

Readers who followed my joint work with Martin Lewis on the Indo-European controversy (which culminated in a book recently published by Cambridge University Press) might recognize the weirdly-shaped map on the left (reproduced from...

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