A man and a woman…

Nov 23, 2011 by

A man and a woman…

[Thanks to Joel M. Hoffman for his inspiring pieces in the Jerusalem Post Glamour of Grammar column on “The birds and the bees” and “Girl people and boy people”. The title of this post alludes to the the...

read more

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...

read more

The human and the frog

Aug 22, 2011 by

[the author thanks Olga Kagan for inspiration] Imagine a bewitched frog, waiting to be kissed in order to turn back into a human. Given a choice between a prince and a princess, who will the enchanted frog kiss? If you are an English...

read more

Modern Hebrew: old or new?

May 19, 2011 by

According to the official story, Hebrew has been “revived” in the late 19th century and early 20th century until it once again became the national language of Israel. But some scholars — such as Paul Wexler and...

read more

Is English the richest language?

Apr 18, 2011 by

I am often asked whether it is true that English (vocabulary) is the richest in the world. After all, English has words that do not have good counterparts in other languages, right? Say, there’s no appropriate Russian...

read more