| Saturday, October 28th, 2006 |
| 3:45 pm |
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| Thursday, April 6th, 2006 |
| 12:29 pm |
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| Wednesday, April 5th, 2006 |
| 5:18 pm |
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| Wednesday, February 15th, 2006 |
| 7:07 pm |
Just realized...
English seems to be the only well-known European language using the letter j for [dʒ].
(I guess Manx and Modern Scots don't qualify for "well-known".)
Do I forget anything?
It came to my mind while discussing things in  foxfour's journal.
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| Friday, December 23rd, 2005 |
| 9:30 pm |
Nothing is new
Which justifies me re-telling some dated news.
dreiviertel says she's found a text evidencing that the syntacticians' favorite model sentence, John beat (up) Pete, was first used no later than in 9th century. Indeed, in its Latin form: Fortis Iohannus multum percussit debilem Petrum or simply Iohannus percussit Petrum.
Ѣ
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| 9:23 pm |
This sexist world
"Is E=mc2 a sexed equation?...Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us. What seems to me to indicate the possible sexed nature of the equation is not directly its uses by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged what goes the fastest."
(c) Luce Irigaray, translated from French, via edricson.
Ѣ
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| Monday, November 28th, 2005 |
| 10:54 pm |
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| Thursday, November 10th, 2005 |
| 2:13 pm |
Imagine
When I was a teenager, I had troubles with perceiving oral English. Actually, I still have them.
Because of that (and lack of real interest, to be honest), I thought Lennon was depicting some apocalyptic post-nuclear devastation. There isn't this, there isn't that. People who can't think of anything beyond today's pressing needs. A melody nicely setting off the depressing scene. And in the end: "You may say I'm a dreamer" - clearly a piece of grim humor alluding to those evil guys who hasten the disaster.
Art is power.
(Evoked by an article analyzing the song as a manifesto of the values behind political correctness, in the context of the riots in France)
Will be eventually tagged as non-linguistics. |
| Thursday, October 6th, 2005 |
| 4:44 pm |
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| Friday, September 16th, 2005 |
| 10:49 pm |
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| Thursday, September 8th, 2005 |
| 6:52 pm |
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| Tuesday, September 6th, 2005 |
| 7:13 pm |
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| Friday, July 22nd, 2005 |
| 10:07 pm |
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| Thursday, July 21st, 2005 |
| 9:23 pm |
Churchill the Linguist
[They] will always do the right thing... after they've exhausted all the alternatives.
...Sir Winston Churchill couldn't know he was speaking of explaining Optimality Theory...
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| Friday, July 1st, 2005 |
| 10:52 pm |
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| Wednesday, June 29th, 2005 |
| 7:06 pm |
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| Tuesday, June 14th, 2005 |
| 10:39 pm |
Splitting Parts of Speech
It appears that merging parts of speech is fairly common among conlangers. My question is: have you ever tried the opposite - experimenting with more parts of speech than the standard set given in most grammars? For a project I participate in, I proposed recently to split adjectives into two subclasses, to be considered as two different parts of speech. Have you ever experimented with anything similar? Have you considered splitting other parts of speech - substantives, verbs, or adverbs? Have you ever met weird subdivisions of word classes in (descriptions of) natlangs? (cross-posted) |
| Tuesday, June 7th, 2005 |
| 4:45 pm |
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| Monday, April 11th, 2005 |
| 5:46 pm |
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| Monday, December 27th, 2004 |
| 7:58 pm |
A Discovery.
Not mine. Not really new, either. Anyway... Some Germanic languages (e. g. German) have word orders in subordinate clauses very different from WOs available in main clauses. More-less all old Germanic languages had this trait as a tendency (the background being "free" WOs in both main and subordinate clauses). - This is what I've known. What I haven't: Same tendency towards a similarly altered WO worked also in coordinate sentences - for the last of the coordinated clauses. Sorry, I know I should've given the links. They've just been somewhere around.... Worse, I probably should've explained why I found the above so illuminating :) |
