Ekaterina Lyutikova on the Architecture of Grammar

Nov 19, 2015 by

Ekaterina Lyutikova on the Architecture of Grammar

[Note to Readers: the following is my translation from Russian of Ekaterina Lyutikova’s video lecture posted on PostNauka.ru, posted here with her permission. Some Russian examples have been replaced by corresponding English...

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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 Fast-Disappearing Ninilchik Russian of Alaska—And Some of Its Ling...

Apr 6, 2015 by

The Fast-Disappearing Ninilchik Russian of Alaska—And Some of Its Linguistic Peculiarities

Several followers of this blog and I have been discussing an article about the work of Andrei Kibrik (Moscow State University) and Mira Bergelson (The Higher School of Economics, Moscow) on “an antiquated dialect of Russian … still...

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Islamic Fatwas, Grammatical Gender, and Translation—Or Beware of Those...

Oct 26, 2014 by

Islamic Fatwas, Grammatical Gender, and Translation—Or Beware of Those Sexualized Vegetables!

[This post was originally posted in December 2013] A recent report in India Today mentions a fatwa (Muslim religious decree) issued by a cleric associated with the Muslim Brotherhood to prohibit women from swimming in the sea. The...

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What Gender is Your Country?

Oct 26, 2014 by

What Gender is Your Country?

[This post was originally published in November 2013] I am often asked by my students why countries receive masculine or feminine names in languages that make a grammatical gender distinction. For example, why is Portugal masculine...

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“Yo” said, “yo” said…

May 21, 2012 by

“Yo” said, “yo” said…

A recent LotW post discussed a newly introduced gender-neutral third person Swedish pronoun hen. It appears that a similar gender-neutral pronoun is developing naturally in a local dialect of American English. According to a post on...

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