I love you!

Dec 24, 2011 by

I love you!

As linguists, we often tell our students — without giving it a second thought — that all languages are equally grammatically complex. As Guy Deutcher puts it in his Through the Language Glass, “equal complexity is...

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Mind your manners!

Nov 21, 2011 by

In a recent series of posts on conversational implicatures (see here and here) we’ve discussed H. Paul Grice’s theory on how we recognize and interpret implicatures, including the four conversational maxims he has...

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Does Google Translate speak "like a 10-year-old"?

Nov 7, 2011 by

[Thanks to Martin W. Lewis for inspiration for this post] In several earlier posts (see here, here and here), I’ve already touched on the topic of Google Translate and its failures to… translate. But the argument...

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Why Some Languages Sound So Fast, or do they?

Sep 19, 2011 by

As a long-time reader of this blog would already know, I am typically skeptical of “linguistic” studies that calculate an average this and multiply it by an average that and supposedly produce results that are relevant...

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Gender vs. Noun Class: same or different?

Apr 8, 2011 by

Some familiar Indo-European languages like German, French and Russian have gender systems: in those languages nouns belong to one of two or three classes (or types). Typically, such gender systems are based on the natural gender/sex...

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