Winter Offering: Why Do Languages Change?

Nov 21, 2011 by

Winter Offering: Why Do Languages Change?

Jane Austen employed the word intercourse in her novels in the genteel sense of ‘dealings between people’; today, it means ‘copulation’ and nothing else. Shakespeare used holp alongside the modern form helped...

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The evolution of word order and “free word order” language...

Oct 20, 2011 by

In the previous posting, I outlined the recently proposed theory by Gell-Mann and Ruhlen on the origin and evolution of word order. According to their proposal, the most recent common ancestor of all currently living human languages,...

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Where was human language born? — part 2

Apr 15, 2011 by

As has been correctly pointed out to me by Amittai F. Aviram, there is an additional problem with Atkinson’s claim that languages lose phonemes (and consequently, become less and less complex). It is well known from the study...

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Celebrating the “great and powerful”

Jun 10, 2010 by

June 6 — also the birthday of the famous Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin — was for the first time celebrated as the Day of the Russian Language, thanks to the UN decision which proclaimed special holidays for all six...

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