Speech peculiarities in Russian jokes

Feb 10, 2011 by

To stay on the topic of Russian jokes (anekdoty), let me make an observation about such jokes that involve various ethnic characters. But first a disclaimer: although such jokes would be very un-PC in the U.S., they are very popular...

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Great Vowel Shift — part 2

Aug 2, 2010 by

In the last posting in July, I explained the basics of the Great Vowel Shift, a historical process that is responsible for a lot of the “mess” in the English spelling system, as far as vowels are concerned. As you may...

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So what comes first: chicken or egg?

Jun 17, 2010 by

In an earlier posting, I mentioned that grandmothers and grandfathers sounds better in that order. And so does ladies and gentlemen, Mom and Dad and many other so-called binomials (i.e., collocations of the form “X and/or...

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