Discovering the linguistic wheel?

Jul 25, 2011 by

On the one hand, it is great to see so much about linguistics in the popular press and the blogosphere. But on the other hand, many articles (in press and online) that purport to report some newly-made linguistic discovery often make...

read more

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...

read more

How did they say it?

Apr 14, 2011 by

It is not difficult to find websites that offer recordings of historical dialects or even of long-ago dead languages. But how do we know how anything was pronounced in ages past? Unfortunately, there are only three reliable ways to...

read more

Andrei Zalizniak’s lecture

Jan 21, 2011 by

For my Russian-speaking (listening?) readers: this is an excellent lecture by a great Russian linguist Andrei Zalizniak about science and pseudo-science, linguistics, ideology, postmodernism and the national inferiority complex...

read more