On God, Politeness, and the T-V Distinction

Sep 22, 2015 by

On God, Politeness, and the T-V Distinction

This is another post inspired by a question from (and discussion with) David Benkof, who asks about the following “intriguing conundrum for the High Holidays”, when (religious) Jews are thinking “about what our relationship with God...

read more

Some Thoughts on Why Participles Express Urgency?

Sep 21, 2015 by

A recent LanguageLog post by Mark Liberman about a Doonesbury cartoon made me wonder about the import of different English verb forms. The first two and last two panels of the cartoon are reproduced on the left. Liberman writes: The...

read more

Does Google Translate Output Accord with Reality?—And Remarks on the M...

Aug 17, 2015 by

Does Google Translate Output Accord with Reality?—And Remarks on the Morphosyntax of Russian Nominalizations

I have written extensively about problems with Google Translate and its many bloopers in both lexical choices and producing a grammatically cohesive output. It is thus ironic that Google Translate’s “translation” of the Russian...

read more

Some Observations on Morphophonological Adaptation of English-derived ...

Jun 22, 2015 by

Some Observations on Morphophonological Adaptation of English-derived Loanwords in Russian Slang

As discussed in an earlier post, loanwords (i.e. words borrowed from another language) often bear their foreign origins on their sleeve, so to speak. However, it is not true that loanwords always retain their pristine phonological...

read more

Bob’s your uncle

Mar 8, 2012 by

Bob’s your uncle

In an earlier post, we have discussed how kinship terminology differs from language to language. Where one language may have an umbrella term for several different relations, another language make have a more detailed network of...

read more