On the Japanese homeland

May 5, 2011 by

Bayesian phylogeny is becoming a popular method to reconstruct the structure and potentially the homeland of various language families. For example, a study conducted by Quentin D. Atkinson and discussed in an earlier posting uses...

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Blending in

Nov 16, 2010 by

Blending in is probably not what Sarah Palin wanted to achieve (and certainly not what she achieved) with her now-famous “refudiate”. But what it is is a blend, a form of word formation whereby two (or more) words are...

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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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