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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Considering the past

Dec 25, 2011 by

Considering the past

In yesterday’s post, I have shown that languages are not equally grammatically complex by considering the renditions of ‘I love you’ in several languages. It is evident that languages differ widely as to which...

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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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Languages and genes don’t always match

Feb 4, 2011 by

When it comes to classifying ethnic, racial and linguistic groups, many people still believe that if the languages of two groups are related, the peoples must be related as well. But relying on linguistic connections to establish...

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Finnic traits in Russian

Feb 2, 2011 by

As mentioned in the previous posting, the current consensus among Slavic linguists is that Finnic languages once spoken in what is now central Russia have left their mark on the Russian language. In the domain of vocabulary such...

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