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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Considering the past

Dec 25, 2011 by

Considering the past

In yesterday’s post, I have shown that languages are not equally grammatically complex by considering the renditions of ‘I love you’ in several languages. It is evident that languages differ widely as to which...

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What is the most difficult language to learn — and why?

Jun 3, 2011 by

What is the most difficult language to learn — and why?

As mentioned in the previous posting, there are numerous rankings of “difficult” (and “easy”) languages to learn (note that we are talking about second-language learning here, not acquiring one’s native...

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On language laws — again

Jan 28, 2011 by

I’ve written already about language laws and how ridiculous I think they are. But recently another such law was proposed, this time in our country. According to media reports, a New Hampshire state legislator Rep. Jordan Ulery...

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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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