Are We “At the Origin of Language Structure”?—Another Blooper-Riddled ...

Aug 31, 2015 by

Are We “At the Origin of Language Structure”?—Another Blooper-Riddled Article from Science Daily

[Thanks to George Walkden for drawing my attention to the article discussed below and for a helpful discussion of some of its shortcomings.]   A recent article in Science Daily describes the research conducted by “a team from...

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Does Google Translate Output Accord with Reality?—And Remarks on the M...

Aug 17, 2015 by

Does Google Translate Output Accord with Reality?—And Remarks on the Morphosyntax of Russian Nominalizations

I have written extensively about problems with Google Translate and its many bloopers in both lexical choices and producing a grammatically cohesive output. It is thus ironic that Google Translate’s “translation” of the Russian...

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Are Languages of “Primitive Peoples” Primitive?

Jul 28, 2015 by

Are Languages of “Primitive Peoples” Primitive?

A recent discussion of Toki Pona, a conlang dubbed “the world’s smallest language” by Roc Morin on Business Insider Australia website, prompted me to write again on the issue of the so-called “primitive languages” (for my earlier...

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Is Fish “Who” or “What”?

Jun 22, 2015 by

Is Fish “Who” or “What”?

I was asked today whether ryba ‘fish’ in Russian is a “who” or a “what”. Fascinating question, as it turns out! “Who or what?” is a question of animacy, a feature that is both semantic and grammatical (morphological) in Russian. From...

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The Anatomy of “Touching”

Mar 20, 2015 by

The Anatomy of “Touching”

The verb ‘to touch’ in Russian—kasat’sja and its perfective counterpart kosnut’sja—is a very peculiar one, in several respects. To begin with, it is unusual in having the clitic –sja, without any of the meanings typically...

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As Easy as ‘One’, ‘Two’, ‘Three’?—The Morphology and Syntax of “Numera...

Jan 29, 2015 by

As Easy as ‘One’, ‘Two’, ‘Three’?—The Morphology and Syntax of “Numerals” in Old Church Slavonic, Old Russian, and modern Russian

“Numerals”, that is words designating cardinal numbers, in Old Church Slavonic (OCS) and Old Russian (OR) were nouns or pronouns rather than a separate morphosyntactic category, as they are in modern Russian. Hence, for OCS and OR, I...

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