The magic of /i/

Jul 1, 2010 by

At the end of the last posting, I mentioned that both the -o- spelling of /i/ in women and the -ti- spelling of /sh/ in revolution are a result of the special magic of /i/. It is time to look at those sound changes that can be...

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All the colors of the rainbow (and beyond)…

Jun 16, 2010 by

To continue with our theme of lexical divergencies, let’s consider color terms. It has been long known that languages differ as to which colors and even how many they choose to encode with basic color terms. To be considered...

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It’s all in the family!

Jun 15, 2010 by

In yesterday’s posting we started examining basic vocabulary and discovered that languages differ as to how they divide up the world into “packages” of meaning to be denoted by a single word (or root). Many more...

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Finns, genes and languages

Apr 8, 2010 by

The Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM) has compiled the Finnish Gene Atlas, which contains genome-wide gene marker data for more than 40,000 Finns. Among the findings are two interesting points: (1) Finns are unique on...

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