Month: May 2025

Five more ‘classical languages’ for India

I’ve written before that India officially recognised 6 languages as classical languages.  Five more languages were added to the list in October 2024: Assamese, Bengali, Marathi, Pali and Prakrit. Press Release: Press Information Bureau They join the 6 languages already recognised as classical languages: Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Odia. Odia, a classical language in…… Continue reading Five more ‘classical languages’ for India

18 dragons

I recently discovered a second place with a Chinese name that means 9 dragons. I already knew about the Kowloon (九龍) peninsula in Hong. Apparently, the name refers to eight mountains and a Chinese emperor. Kowloon – Wikipedia I’ve now discovered that the Mekong Delta is known in Vietnamese as Nine Dragons (Cửu Long) River.…… Continue reading 18 dragons

No worries

I’ve mentioned before the Australian expression ‘no worries’. I apologise for not having an allergy – Language Miscellany I’ve now come across a brief reference to it in Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words: English, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese, by Anna Wierzbicka (1997).   She describes it as a characteristic Australian interjection (alongside good…… Continue reading No worries

Mainland Southeast Asian languages

Mainland Southeast Asia is home to speakers of around 280 languages spread across 5 families: the Mon-Khmer branch of Austroasiatic (including Vietnamese and Khmer) Sino-Tibetan (including Mandarin and other Sinitic languages, and Burmese and other Tibeto-Burman languages) Tai-Kadai (including Thai and Lao) Hmong-Mien (languages of southwest China) Austronesian (languages spoken mainly in Oceania, but represented…… Continue reading Mainland Southeast Asian languages

Odd choice for a Swiss place name

Watching a movie on a flight recently, I was struck by an odd subtitling decision. The dialogue said the main protagonist of the German film Die Theorie von Allem was from Graubünden. The English subtitles said he was from the Swiss Canton of Grisons. Adding the Swiss Canton of in the subtitles was a sensible…… Continue reading Odd choice for a Swiss place name

Selecting the auxiliary for French and Italian anticausatives

In forming the perfect tense, both French and Italian use the auxiliary ‘have’ (Italian avere, French avoir) for most verbs, but the auxiliary ‘be’ (Italian essere, French être) for some verbs. Both languages use ‘have’ for all (non-reflexive) transitive verbs and use ‘be’ for reflexive verbs. For some intransitive verbs, both languages use ‘have’, but…… Continue reading Selecting the auxiliary for French and Italian anticausatives

Greenberg’s list of universals

How much do languages differ and how similar are languages? An early attempt to consider these questions was a conference on language universals held in New York in 1961. Papers based on those prepared for the conference were published in 1963 in Universals of Language, edited by Joseph H Greenberg. (a 2nd, paperback, edition, appeared…… Continue reading Greenberg’s list of universals

Kanzi has died

Kanzi, a bonobo who featured ins some of the best-known research on communication by great apes, died on 18 March 2025 at the Ape Conservation and Cognition Initiative (ACCI) research center in Des Moines, Iowa, aged 44.  https://www.iflscience.com/rip-kanzi-the-talking-bonobo-who-understood-human-language-78513 Kanzi reportedly developed a vocabulary of over 3,000 ‘words’, and some early research suggested he could understand…… Continue reading Kanzi has died