I am a nerd for languages, and I’m a fan of linguistics. Here I’ll share what I’m learning about how language is, or how it works.
Reading Time: 4 minutes Folks who get to know me usually (and regrettably) discover that I am a language nerd. I like learning languages and I like learning about languages. There’s all sorts of things that are fascinating about languages: where they come from, why they sound a certain way, why grammar is what it is. But lately, I’ve
Reading Time: 5 minutes Thanks to a solid 55 years or so of film and TV telling us that the AIs we create will try to kill us, and then watching ChatGPT and operator-attacking-murder-AIs emerge in roughly the same 6 month time frame , I feel absolutely confident in saying that humans are terrible listeners. But I think, also,
Reading Time: 3 minutes About every month I find myself looking at some US Dialect Map trying to figure out where some person I’ve met fits in. And inevitably it takes me back to pondering the fact that in my own family we speak at least two, maybe three separate dialects of American English. In fact I have a
Reading Time: 2 minutes For the last two years my wife and I have been privately taking ASL (American Sign Language) lessons. We are far from fluent but we’re also well beyond introductions and names. And something that you might wonder is, “are there accents and dialects in signed languages?”.
Reading Time: 4 minutes Ever heard that Arabic has 10 million words? That English has a million? French has 80,000, or that the Alaskan Inuits have no word for love but 16 for snow? Why is that?
Reading Time: 2 minutes Because its origins are Greek I had a Spanish professor (who was Greek) years ago who explained that, just about any word with a “-ma” ending was a Greek word and should be treated masculine. That doesn’t mean the word in Greek was masculine, though Greek has three grammatical genders. And πρόβλημα, (provlema) is in
Reading Time: 2 minutes Anyone who knows me knows that I have a bit of a thing for languages. I like studying them and I like speaking them. But I also like learning how they…work. A few years ago I read a book called, The Secret Life of Pronouns which got me interested in sentiment analysis. The central thesis of
Reading Time: 11 minutes I’ve loved learning languages for most of my life. Because I hold degrees in two languages and demonstrate varying levels of proficiency in several others, I sometimes get asked how many languages I know, or when, or how, I started learning them. Learning languages is such a passion that I’ve been known to stop anyone