On tone genesis in Vietnamese

Dec 8, 2011 by

BY NIKHIL RAGHURAM (“Languages of the World”) Even though there is a fairly well accepted model for the development of tones in Vietnamese, linguists still have questions about Vietnamese tonogenesis. One of the major...

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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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More on word order, morphological types and historical change

Oct 24, 2011 by

In a comment to the previous posting, Venelina Dimitrova raised a number of interesting issues, which I thought it would be best to address in a separate posting rather than in the comment section. 1. Is there a correlation between...

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What is the most difficult language to learn — and why?

Jun 3, 2011 by

What is the most difficult language to learn — and why?

As mentioned in the previous posting, there are numerous rankings of “difficult” (and “easy”) languages to learn (note that we are talking about second-language learning here, not acquiring one’s native...

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Adding apples and oranges?

Apr 25, 2011 by

In several earlier positngs (and also here), I discussed the research on the geographical origin of language by Dr. Atkinson recently published in Science. In those postings I identified several problems with Dr. Atkinson’s...

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