Mother tongue comes from your (prehistoric) father, or does it?

Sep 22, 2011 by

According to a recent study, conducted by Peter Forster and Colin Renfrew of the University of Cambridge and discussed in Science Daily, “language change among our prehistoric ancestors came about via the arrival of immigrant...

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BBC enquires “Why do some Americanisms irritate people?”

Jul 21, 2011 by

Recently a student of mine forwarded to me this article from the BBC website. BBC has long been the stronghold of “proper English”, so I am not completely surprised to see such a strong rhetoric coming out of a BBC...

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Uzbek, “the penguin of Turkic languages”

Feb 25, 2011 by

A quick clarification about an earlier posting on Turkic languages. There I said that of the four major Turkic languages in Central Asia — Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz and Turkmen — Turkmen is the real “odd man out”....

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Internal classification of Turkic languages

Feb 22, 2011 by

To wrap up our recent discussion of Turkic languages, let’s consider another quote from Bernard Lewis’ book The Middle East. A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years. He writes: “…Azerbaijan and the five...

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Turkic words in Russian

Feb 14, 2011 by

Staying on the subject of Turkic languages, let’s consider what impact these languages had on the Russian language. Some time ago we’ve considered the influence of Finnic languages on Russian, which, as I pointed out in...

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