Non-standard English on the Islands of the South Atlantic

Nov 18, 2015 by

Non-standard English on the Islands of the South Atlantic

[Note to Readers: This post was originally published in August 2012.] The Falkland/Malvinas Islands consists of some 780 islands in South Atlantic, with the total area of about 4,700 square miles, which is slightly larger than...

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Brittany, Another Independence-Seeking European Region

Nov 18, 2015 by

Brittany, Another Independence-Seeking European Region

[Note to Readers: This post was originally published in January 2014.] Brittany in northwestern France is one of several regions in Europe that is seeking increased autonomy, if not complete independence, and instructive parallels...

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Teaching Breton Language at Harvard

Nov 18, 2015 by

Teaching Breton Language at Harvard

[Note to Readers: this post was originally published in September 2013.] In an op-ed piece entitled “What You (Really) Need to Know,” published in the New York Times in January 2012, Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard...

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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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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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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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Are Indo-Europeans “Untraceable”?—A Response to Jean-Paul Demoule...

Oct 25, 2015 by

Are Indo-Europeans “Untraceable”?—A Response to Jean-Paul Demoule

[Thanks to LanguagesOfTheWorld reader, Arjan, who drew my attention to the article discussed here.]   In a recent interview titled “Indo-Europeans, the untraceable people that racist fantasies are obsessed with”*, published in a...

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