Why the ‘Coffee’ Words Are Not Cognates

Dec 12, 2014 by

Why the ‘Coffee’ Words Are Not Cognates

A former student of mine drew my attention to a recent article in Slate written by Alyssa Pelish and titled “The Stimulating History of Coffee: Why You Hear This Word Around the World” (the image on the left is reproduced from the...

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The Altaic family controversy

Feb 16, 2011 by

So now that we’ve been introduced to the three language groupings that are hypothesized to constitute the core of the proposed Altaic language family — Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic languages — we can consider the...

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Turkic words in Russian

Feb 14, 2011 by

Staying on the subject of Turkic languages, let’s consider what impact these languages had on the Russian language. Some time ago we’ve considered the influence of Finnic languages on Russian, which, as I pointed out in...

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