Pat’s Polemics

Talking about “sit-ins” in the Civil Rights struggle: mentioning a book on John Lewis, they write “des sits-in”. The French are getting even with all (Continue Reading)

Sent to flteach OK. This has gone on a bit and, as has happened so often in the past to me on this List, I (Continue Reading)

Throughout my life I’ve misunderstood a word here and there, even in English. One I remember was “enroach”, which my buddy corrected with an incredulous (Continue Reading)

Steven Pinker gave us a nice exposition on irregular plurals in English in his famous The Language Instinct. It was fascinating how a leaf can (Continue Reading)

I’ve said certain key principles of linguistics should be understood by all fl teachers if not by all teachers, e.g. languages are changed by people (Continue Reading)

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)