3D-landcape, 3D-language?

Dec 27, 2011 by

3D-landcape, 3D-language?

In yesterday’s post I mentioned that languages of the Northeast Caucasus, such as Avar, Tzes and Tabasaran, are famous for their extremely rich case systems; most of their case distinctions are used to mark various aspects of...

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Making my case

Dec 26, 2011 by

Making my case

In the last couple of posts, I’ve discussed the issue of grammatical complexity and have shown that even if an objective measure of such complexity is absent, languages clearly differ as to which grammatical distinctions they...

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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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Speech peculiarities in Russian jokes

Feb 10, 2011 by

To stay on the topic of Russian jokes (anekdoty), let me make an observation about such jokes that involve various ethnic characters. But first a disclaimer: although such jokes would be very un-PC in the U.S., they are very popular...

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