On H-dropping again

Feb 6, 2012 by

On H-dropping again

In an earlier post, I mentioned H-dropping as one of the characteristic features of Cockney, the lower class variety of English from the streets of London’s East End. Recall Professor Higgins’ complaints: “Hear them down in...

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Loanwords in Armenian

Jan 30, 2012 by

Loanwords in Armenian

A close scrutiny of loanwords in the Armenian language – or in any language, for that matter – is essentially a demonstration of the close contacts between the speakers of the language and their neighbors.  In other words, the...

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Americanisms vs. Britishisms

Sep 29, 2011 by

In a recent posting, I’ve looked at the journalist Matthew Engel’s BBC piece on Americanisms in British English and discussed some of the fallacies found in that article. One of the points I made there is that...

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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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A is for… loanwords!

Feb 15, 2011 by

While researching the phonological and morphological properties of Turkic loanwords in Russian, I ran into an interesting factoid that I’d like to share. As it turns out, words that begin with a in Russian are almost all...

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