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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On “Passive Aggressive” and Other Wrong-Headed Advice of Strunk &...

Sep 9, 2015 by

On “Passive Aggressive” and Other Wrong-Headed Advice of Strunk & White’s Style Manual

This post is prompted by a recent Facebook discussion about the “50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice” article, published by Geoffrey K. Pullum in The Chronicle of Higher Education in April 2009. Although I typically comment on more...

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Old Church Slavonic Manuscripts

Jan 4, 2015 by

Old Church Slavonic Manuscripts

The corpus of OCS texts dating from 860-1100 CE is rather small. The oldest dated Slavic text is a gravestone inscription erected in 993 CE by Samuel, who later became Tsar and established the so-called Western Bulgarian Empire in...

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Old Church Slavonic Writing: Glagolitic vs. Cyrillic

Jan 4, 2015 by

Old Church Slavonic Writing: Glagolitic vs. Cyrillic

[Thanks to Natalia Kondrashova for a helpful discussion of some of the topics discussed in this post.] Old Church Slavonic manuscripts are written in two alphabets: Glagolitic or Cyrillic. Scholars debate as to which of the two...

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On Dr Zhivago, Genitive Case of Adjectives, and the 1918 Russian Ortho...

Sep 22, 2014 by

On Dr Zhivago, Genitive Case of Adjectives, and the 1918 Russian Orthography Reform

[Thanks to John Gorentz for challenging me with a question that prompted this post] Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak is one of the better-known works of Russian literature in the West. In a recent article about the novel in the London...

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Haves and have-nots

Oct 21, 2010 by

So how do you punctuate the following sentence to make it sensible (although admitedly still not the most beautiful sentence of English!): James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher...

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