Our son Anthony is in First grade and has spelling tests on Fridays from his weekly list. I’m mostly a musician but love to help him with his spelling by telling him the history of the letter K for example. Our question is this: Why do we not pronounce all the written syllables in the […]
Last post I mostly just groused about how little grammar most people know. Today, in an attempt at a more useful follow-up, I’ll go over the basic categories of words in English, which you may have learned as the “parts of speech.” I’m drawing from and drastically simplifying Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum’s A Student’s […]
Everybody knows that a noun’s a person, place, or thing. But in a sentence like “That the man was overwhelmed was obvious,” is “man” the subject? Or is the whole phrase “that the man was obvious” one big noun? MLP *** Dear Mulp, You are mixing two things here: subjects and nouns. Noun is a […]
Hi! I’m a Spanish/French major and I like to write in my spare time. My latest story is about a band of vigilante murderers and for the past few weeks I’ve been trying to make up a noun that the vigilante characters use to label people as ‘someone that deserves to die/be killed’. I’ve played […]
The Language Nerd is doing a series on Ethiopian linguistics – intro here, then parts one, two, and three. So throughout this little Ethiopian lingventure I’ve been mentioning Ge’ez and the Fidel. Ge’ez down to here, Ge’ez out to there, Ge’ez to where it stops by itself. It’s about damn time that I gave it […]
This is the third post in the Language Nerd’s series on Ethiopian linguistics. Follow the links for the intro, part one, and part two. Today’s post comes mainly from an interview with Dr. Moges Yigezu and from his book Language Ideologies and Challenges of Multilingual Education in Ethiopia: The Case of Harari Region. As I […]
This is the second article in the Language Nerd’s series on linguistics in Ethiopia. Intro here, part one here. So you’re a linguist, and you’ve decided to document a language. Maybe it’s a big language, with millions of speakers; maybe you’ve been invited to a tiny community where the speakers number in the dozens. Maybe […]
The Language Nerd is in Ethiopia! This is the first in a series on Ethiopian linguistics. The introduction is here. These posts are not in the usual q-and-a style, because I don’t exactly have a backlog of Ethiopian linguistics questions. But by gum, if you’ve got an Ethiopian linguistics question, then send it in, double-time! […]
You’re in Ethiopia? WTF? Why? What’s going on? –pretty much everyone I know *** Dear Everyone, People, Ethiopia is Language Nerd Heaven. The real question is why I didn’t get over here sooner. There are eighty-odd languages in Ethiopia. Some say 82, some say 85, some say more. Part of the reason it’s difficult to […]
Dear Language Nerd, I see “Latin@” all the time on tumblr (referring to people from South America/Central America/Mexico). What’s the deal with the “at” sign? -Gringo (Gring@?) *** Dear G, Grammatical gender and a healthy dose of language politics. Let’s dig in. We have a handful of nouns in English that are connected to a […]