What Is a Synthetic Language?

Sep 21, 2015 by

What Is a Synthetic Language?

The following is a question I have recently been asked by my former student and Facebook friend, David Benkof: “what’s a synthetic language? How synthetic is Hebrew? Esperanto? Latvian?”   As noted in my earlier post, the term...

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Oman, a Land Apart

May 4, 2015 by

Oman, a Land Apart

[Continuing with the theme of the Arabic-speaking world, here’s a post originally published in June 2012] Much attention in the conventional media has been focused on the “Arab Spring” events of the past year and a half....

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Loanwords in Armenian

Jan 30, 2012 by

Loanwords in Armenian

A close scrutiny of loanwords in the Armenian language – or in any language, for that matter – is essentially a demonstration of the close contacts between the speakers of the language and their neighbors.  In other words, the...

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You save what you speak?

Oct 25, 2011 by

As noted in a number of previous postings (see here and here), recently more and more non-linguists come out with research involving language. And very often, whether it’s biologists, physicists or economists that make claims...

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Give me some space!

Oct 5, 2010 by

In yesterday’s posting, I mentioned that medieval manuscripts and inscriptions often used a line over the top of an abbreviation or an acronym to mark them as such. This was illustrated with the Kirkdale sundial. Another...

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