Pat’s Polemics

Apparently most languages are syntactically based. Some are semantically based. The only way I can describe the latter, since the author, R.M.W. Dixon, gives few (Continue Reading)

A force or influence in The Free Dictionary. The seventh item down in Google with search title Vector Verb Definition (just Vector verb gives you (Continue Reading)

I have a whole lot to say but to me the first thing to recognize is the BARRIERS to understanding, the main one of which (Continue Reading)

Wondering how we get ergative languages, my thoughts went to a theory of language change I came up with, no doubt spurred by a variety (Continue Reading)

An excerpt from a discussion of using Roman script to write languages like Hindi and Urdu which have traditional scripts. In this situation, with such (Continue Reading)

Helen DeWitt’s wonderful novel The Last Samurai has unfortunately gone out of print, so I was happy to learn from her yesterday that a new (Continue Reading)

Here’s a really good description of a person who spoke a language as a second language and as a child, abandoning it around age 10, (Continue Reading)

Explain to your student why “he pissed her off” is OK but “he pissed off her” is not, while “he p.o.’d her” is OK but (Continue Reading)

Great example of pronunciation spelling, the opposite of spelling pronunciation: In Peru it’s not but I have also gotten that some reaction from americans born (Continue Reading)

Thinking of the French bon appetit and English appetite, I wondered if they came from Latin ad petere, and sure enough, they do, ad + (Continue Reading)

“… has really caughten up….” quickly corrected to “caught up”, spoken by the therapist at the hospital. I remember we used to laugh at my (Continue Reading)

Here’s an example of how irregularities arise (from John McWhorter’s Defining Creole, p 61: “A less familiar example is in Lahu, where an erstwhile causative (Continue Reading)

See the post below my comment.. In another thread on the list, we see the use of ser for location rather than the normal estar, (Continue Reading)

Kweyol is not French and it is most certainly not a debased language. It is a full language. Some scholars have called Creoles young languages (Continue Reading)

Our Martian lands on earth. He happens to touch down on the Anatolian Plateau in the middle of modern day Turkey. He notices people using (Continue Reading)

I’m just learning about serial verbs in Kweyol, e.g. desann kouri = come running down. These verb chains in Spanish are called perifrasis, e.g. llega (Continue Reading)

Who do you want to visit? Note that this is an ambiguous sentence; it could mean who do you want to go see or who (Continue Reading)

An example of idiomaticity would be: “Made in China” is expressed in Spanish by Hecho en China, using the verb “hacer”, to do or make. (Continue Reading)

From Roger Lass’ Old English: A Historical Linguistic Companion, p. 133n. Note how mere possession of a ‘rich’ inflectional morphology doesn’t imply lack of ambiguity (Continue Reading)

At this url, http://www.upworthy.com/if-we-legalize-weed-in-america-well-have-to-deal-with-a-lot-more-of-these-people-6?c=upw9 you will find a funny video about the effects of marijuana but that’s not what I want you to notice I’m (Continue Reading)

My wife said the difference between two medications might be the coating, I thought, but then I wondered if she had said codeine. Then it (Continue Reading)

Tuesday I heard someone on the radio, a person of some education and used to public speaking, pronounce ‘espouse’ the verb like the word “spouse”, (Continue Reading)

This is a frequent topic for armchair linguists, those who know little of the nuts and bolts of language but, like the theorists who said (Continue Reading)