Modern Hebrew: old or new? (Part 2)

May 20, 2011 by

As mentioned in the previous posting, in Ben-Yehuda’s own time many perceived his “revived” form of Hebrew as a modernized version of the old language, Biblical Hebrew. Some liked the continuity and viewed the...

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Uzbek, “the penguin of Turkic languages”

Feb 25, 2011 by

A quick clarification about an earlier posting on Turkic languages. There I said that of the four major Turkic languages in Central Asia — Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz and Turkmen — Turkmen is the real “odd man out”....

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Who’s on First? (Or "Verb Second without counting")

Dec 20, 2010 by

At the end of the last posting I mentioned the following conundrum: if language/grammar cannot count (a generalization that is a corrolary of the Structure Dependence Principle), how come it can make references to the second...

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Verb-Second in English

Apr 23, 2010 by

In yesterday’s posting, I asked whether English has any Verb-Second (V2) effects, namely any types of sentences in which the conjugated/finite verb must appear in the second position, even if the subject does not appear in the...

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So is Icelandic hard to learn?

Apr 22, 2010 by

So is Icelandic “one of the most difficult languages to learn”, as one of the CNN reporters said? I don’t think so! In general, the difficulty of learning another language depends on the degree of difference between...

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