Month: January 2026

Names for some Portuguese tenses differ between Portugal and Brazil

Portuguese grammars in Brazil and in Portugal have different names for some tenses (table 1). Table 1. Names for some Portuguese tenses In PortugalIn BrazilEnglishIndicativo futuroIndicativo future do presentoFuture (indicative)CondicionalIndicativo future do préteritoConditionalConjuntivoSubjuntivoSubjunctiveInfinitivo flexiandoInfinitivo pessoalInflected (or personal) infinitiveInfinitivo não flexiandoInfinitivo impessoalInfinitive The English labels given in the right-hand column are from Willis (1971). Willis (1971)…… Continue reading Names for some Portuguese tenses differ between Portugal and Brazil

Faithful to the English language?

The latest season of the UK version of the TV reality game show The Traitors has just finished. I suspect most viewers didn’t spot an interesting piece of morphosyntax. The game The game is played between 22 people. 19 of them are selected to be ‘faithful’ and the other 3 are selected to be ‘traitors’.…… Continue reading Faithful to the English language?

The future of German noun plurals

Native German nouns typically form their plurals with a variety of markers, including vowel changes (‘Umlaut’), -(e)n, -(e) and (-er). The marker -s is used for some words borrowed from other languages and for items such as acronyms, abbreviations and some proper names. Janda (2021) predicts (perhaps surprisingly) that -s will ultimately become the regular…… Continue reading The future of German noun plurals

‘Based off’ again

I’ve commented before on people using the phrase “based off of” instead of the seemingly more logical “based on”. https://languagemiscellany.com/2022/08/what-is-this-like-based-on/ A recent (open access) paper in the journal English Language and Linguistics finds a rapid rise of based off (of) alongside based on and a similar recent increase in the use of off with 6 other verbs. The…… Continue reading ‘Based off’ again

Where did Russian words come from?

In this post, I look at 35 words that Russian inherited directly from Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the presumed ancestor of the Indo-European family of languages. In future posts, I will look at another 99 words inherited by Russian directly from PIE and 36 words inherited from other sources, mainly Proto-Balto-Slavic or Proto-Slavic: 43 verbs inherited by…… Continue reading Where did Russian words come from?

Kids and prepositions

Use of prepositions is notoriously arbitrary, and subject to great variation, both between different languages and between different speakers in a single language. Learning which propositions to use is often one of the hardest parts of learning to speak a foreign language. A couple of months ago, our youngest grandchild (4 years 8 months) said…… Continue reading Kids and prepositions

An apparent mismatch between an article and the noun it modifies

Sometimes a definite or indefinite article appears not to match the match the gender and/or number of the noun modified by it (in languages which have grammatical gender and/or mark number). Fábregas and Scalise (2012) give 2 interesting examples of such mismatches, one Italian and the other Spanish. Italian example Testa is a feminine noun…… Continue reading An apparent mismatch between an article and the noun it modifies

Lateral consonants

Lateral consonants are consonants produced with the tongue blocking (or nearly blocking) the airflow in the centre of the mouth but allowing air to flow around the side(s) of the tongue. English has one lateral phoneme: /l/, written as <l> or <L>. Definition Ladefoged and Maddieson (1996) define laterals as sounds ‘in which the tongue…… Continue reading Lateral consonants

Shaetlan—the language of Shetland

Shaetlan, the language of Shetland, has now been awarded an ISO 3-letter code: scz  https://iso639-3.sil.org/code/scz For more on ISO language codes, please see Russian: an official language at the ISO – Language Miscellany Shaetlan has sometimes been regarded as ‘just a dialect’ of English or as a ‘just a dialect’ of Scots, but the awarding…… Continue reading Shaetlan—the language of Shetland