Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

Dec 21, 2010 by

While doing my post-Hannukkah/pre-Christmas grocery shopping, I was exposed to a ubiquitous holiday jingle galore on the supermarket radio. You know, the usual kind: “Jingle bells”, “Feliz Navidad” (a nod to...

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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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Dividing up the world

Jun 14, 2010 by

In the last posting we touched on a very important topic: lexical divergencies between languages. When it comes to languages learning or translation, people often think that words (for the most part) match up in meaning across...

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