Why Are There Different Languages?—Response to Vyvyan Evans (Part 4, C...

Dec 3, 2015 by

Why Are There Different Languages?—Response to Vyvyan Evans (Part 4, Conclusion)

[Many thanks to Martin W. Lewis and Johanna Nichols for insightful discussions of some of the issues considered in this post.]   As discussed in the previous post, Vyvyan Evans advocates an alternative to the so-called saltationist...

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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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"The one who hopes"

Apr 12, 2010 by

In recent postings, I discussed two artificial “alien” languages invented for use in feature films: Na’vi and Klingon. Yet, cinema is not the only reason to make up an artificial language. For example, Esperanto...

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A new language has been born!

Apr 5, 2010 by

The world has seen a birth of a new language recently. Well, maybe… Almost! I am talking about Na’vi, the language of the aliens in the film Avatar. Of course, as an alien language, Na’vi would not be of much...

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