What Is a Synthetic Language?

Sep 21, 2015 by

What Is a Synthetic Language?

The following is a question I have recently been asked by my former student and Facebook friend, David Benkof: “what’s a synthetic language? How synthetic is Hebrew? Esperanto? Latvian?”   As noted in my earlier post, the term...

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Language Referendum in Latvia

Feb 20, 2012 by

On February 18, 2012 Latvia held a referendum on the issue of Russian as a second official language. A turnout of more than 70 percent underscored the extent that this issue has stirred the public, and the results were overwhelmingly...

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Making my case

Dec 26, 2011 by

Making my case

In the last couple of posts, I’ve discussed the issue of grammatical complexity and have shown that even if an objective measure of such complexity is absent, languages clearly differ as to which grammatical distinctions they...

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Language situation and language policy in Latvia

Jul 16, 2011 by

The Ethnologue’s page on Latvia states that there are five living languages spoken in this Baltic country: Latvian, Latvian Sign Language, Liv, Baltic Romani and Eastern Yiddish. But this is true only in as much as only the...

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