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 […]
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 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! […]
Last post I addressed a question about language complexity, which you can get to here. Today, I’m going straight-up tangent and answering a second, implied question. Here’s the relevant bit: “people from the south (in america) seem to speak slower than people from the north, even though in theory we all speak the same language.” […]
so i read somewhere on the internet that all languages are spoken at the same rate. meaning that even if a language has lots of extra words or really long words, people tend to say them faster so that their sentences take about the same length of time to say as a language with short […]
So that Adele song, ‘Rumor Has It’, has been stuck in my head and has me wondering about the line, ‘she is half your age’, because Adele was 21 when she sang that….so how old was this dude? Because the only way he could have a girlfriend half his age and it not be illegal […]
Saluton, Language Nerd! If you don’t recognize the greeting, you obviously don’t know Esperanto. Most other folks don’t either; it just didn’t seem to catch on. But I’m wondering: has there ever been a completely contrived language that hit the big time and became the common tongue in some corner of the world? -Robbie *** […]
Dear Language Nerd, What’s the difference between “begging the question” and “raising the question”? I was with a colleague yesterday and he was going on about how furious he was that people use the two interchangeably. I didn’t know why it mattered so I just nodded and grimaced at appropriate times. Please help, I am […]
Dear Language Nerd, Why do news anchors and the like say “an historic occasion” when they would never say “an history book”? -JRS *** Dear Jurs, Because it’s fancier. But not because it’s right. First, let’s go over what the “a/an” rule really is, and super-double-first, let’s go over what it isn’t: it isn’t a […]