If you have ever tried to learn Mandarin, you have probably come across a list of 4 words (with different meanings) that, although they are made up of the same vowel and consonant, have different pronunciations because they bear different tones. I recently came across a similar list exemplifying the 6 tones of Vietnamese. Mandarin…… Continue reading Some words distinguished only by tones
Month: February 2025
All of which
A sentence like (1) contains a relative clause which seems stilted and unnecessarily clumsy. (1) The Apollo spaceships, all of which returned safely, …. Sentence (1a) is perhaps slightly better, but still a little clumsy. (1a) The Apollo spaceships, of which all returned safely, …. A cleaner version is (2). (2) The Apollo spaceships, which…… Continue reading All of which
The mother of all Australian languages?
A recent book proposes that nearly all indigenous Australian languages have a common ancestor. The book is Proto-Australian: Reconstruction of a Common Ancestor Language, Mark Harvey and Robert Mailhammer (2024). Where and when did people speak Proto-Australian? Harvey and Mailhammer conclude that Proto-Australian was most likely spoken about 6,000 years ago in the Top End…… Continue reading The mother of all Australian languages?
A human pattern in whale song
Researchers have detected in whale song a statistical pattern known as Zipf’s law. Zipf’s law shows up in human language and in the statistical distribution of many other social and natural phenomena, including the size of cities. However, the researchers say that this is the first time Zipf’s law has been found in sounds made…… Continue reading A human pattern in whale song
English has all the syllables it needs
In this post, I consider whether English has enough distinct syllables to create all the words it needs. Actual, possible and impossible syllables If we look at the sound system of a language, we can identify 3 types of syllable: syllables in words that exist in that language. An English example is brick /brik/. syllables…… Continue reading English has all the syllables it needs
More or less is not the same as more_or_less
The phrase more or less can be surprisingly ambiguous. I first saw this ambiguity when I was drafting something for this blog. I’d originally drafted sentence (1): (1) I presume that these borrowing patterns indicate when the Uralic languages diverged and when contacts with speakers of other languages became more or less intense. I was…… Continue reading More or less is not the same as more_or_less