Chineasy is a brand that sells products for learning Chinese characters. Chineasy has recently released a beta version of ‘Chineasy Atlas’, a web-based tool. The home page displays a 3-dimensional character cloud. Holding the cursor over any character displays basic information about the character: character pronunciation meaning for compound characters, the components and their meaning…… Continue reading Learning Chinese characters An on line
Tag: Resource
Conjugated prepositions in Welsh and Irish (and Hungarian and Finnish)
The Celtic languages have an unusual feature: inflections suffixed to most simple prepositions used with pronouns. I discuss below: conjugated prepositions in Welsh, and in Irish; conjugated postpositions in the 2 main Uralic languages (Hungarian and Finnish); conjugated adpositions (prepositions or postpositions) in languages around the world. Welsh In Welsh, the suffix forms typically have…… Continue reading Conjugated prepositions in Welsh and Irish (and Hungarian and Finnish)
Glottle
The word guessing game Wordle continues to inspire new variations on the theme. I’ve just come across Glottle, a game that involves trying to guess a mystery language. For more on Wordle, please see Wordle – Language Miscellany You start by guessing a language. The game then shows a tree displaying the target language,…… Continue reading Glottle
Enjoyable history of English letters
Danny Bate’s recent book Why Q needs U: a history of our letters and how we use them (2025) is an entertaining guide to the histories and shapes of the letters in the modern English alphabet. It contains 26 chapters (‘numbered’, unsurprisingly, A to Z), and an introduction and an epilogue. Content Each chapter address…… Continue reading Enjoyable history of English letters
The Indo-European Lexicon project
The aim of the Indo-European Lexicon (IELEX) at The University of Texas at Austin is to collect the individual words of Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the common parent of the Indo-European (IE) family of languages. No documents of PIE exist because it predates the invention of writing. Historical linguists use the ‘comparative method’ to reconstruct elements of…… Continue reading The Indo-European Lexicon project
Irish challenge (3)
This post is the 3rd instalment of the Irish leg of my current Celtic challenge. It covers those parts of chapters 1 and 2 of Teach Yourself Irish that I didn’t cover in the 2nd instalment. The 1st instalment covered Irish spelling and pronunciation. Questions and answers Yes and no Irish has no words for…… Continue reading Irish challenge (3)
Some French false friends
The French language has many faux amis (French for ‘false friends’)—words looking like English words but having different meanings. Here are a few of many false words listed in Thody & Evans (1985) or Worth-Stylianou (1992). All are words I have come across in France or when I lived in Luxembourg. French wordMeaningCommentsActionshare (in a…… Continue reading Some French false friends
Recording regional and hyper-local swear words before they disappear
Linguists at the University of Sheffield have launched a project to create the UK’s first national repository of regional swear words. UK’s first-ever national swear word census to capture real use of English language | News | The University of Sheffield The researchers say they aim to preserve a record of regional and dialect words…… Continue reading Recording regional and hyper-local swear words before they disappear
Language or dialect
Two language varieties are often regarded as separate languages if they differ greatly and if speakers of each variety cannot easily understand the other variety. They are often viewed as dialects of a single language if they differ little and if their speakers can readily understand each other. In between those extremes, there is no clear distinction between a…… Continue reading Language or dialect
‘Syntactic doubling’ of Italian consonants
Single Italian consonants become pronounced as double (long) consonants (‘geminates’) if they follow: a stressed vowel some short unstressed words The Italian name for this process is raddoppiamento syntattico (‘syntactic (re)doubling’), or sometimes rafforzamento fonosyntactico (‘phonosyntactic stregntening’). ‘Syntactic’ refers to the fact that the doubling crosses word boundaries, unlike in word-internal geminate consonants as in [gattto] ‘cat’…… Continue reading ‘Syntactic doubling’ of Italian consonants