Filed under: All Linguistics Themes, Historical Linguistics, Language-specific, Morphology, Phonology, Semantics, Syntax
Many of you language geeks may have heard of the (relatively new) World Atlas of Language Structures, a project carried out primarily by researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.
The volume, which has maps of linguistic features (a relative first) including word order, morphological features and more, has proven a bit pricy. Not anymore, however: the entire work is now available online for FREE! It’s even better than pie and chips.
Give it a look at http://www.wals.info/.
Technorati Tags: language, typological classification
Filed under: All Linguistics Themes, Historical Linguistics, Language-specific | Tags: california, native languages
For a recent paper I completed (which should be up here soon), I researched Native American languages in California, and the relative maintenance and/or decline thereof. On my path to resources, I stumbled across a nice little work entitled American Words: An introduction to those native words used in english in the US and Canada. The book actually turned out to be incredibly interesting, enough so to write a short piece about it. (Not only that, but it was written by Jack Forbes at UC Davis in 1979, and I feel a need to promote other Aggies when the chance arises.)
Technorati Tags: etymology, native american language
Math majors out there will show some interest in this one: English vocabulary gives us some hints on it’s historical number system. And, interestingly, this whole business of dividing things in terms of ten may not have been an original feature.
Number systems like the one in English are regarded as “Base-10,” where 10 is an especially meaningful unit. For example, the addition of ten turns “twenty-two” into “thirty-two,” and number prefixes (“twenty,” “thirty,” “forty”) are always increments of ten. Historically, however, it would appear that English was different.
A new study suggests that the human race nearly went extinct some 70,000 years ago. Interestingly (or perhaps as we should expect), this theory is supported by linguistic typology.
The study says:
The human population at that time was reduced to small isolated groups in Africa, apparently because of drought [...] [It is]estimated that the number of early humans may have shrunk as low as 2,000 before numbers began to expand again in the early Stone Age.
In a recent typology class, two quite famous mysteries of the English language were brought up. Of course, they can’t be that famous, since I’ve never heard of them and I’m sure there are many like me, and I therefore elected to blog a bit about these two exciting enigmas.
Many of you may be familiar with the German derogative phrase “Schweinhund,” literally “pig dog.” However, did you know that “pig” and “dog” may give us clues about the who inhabited the British Isles before the Anglos (and, consequently, the Indo-European language family) arrived?
