The artificial language artificial language Esperanto was created by a Polish Doctor Ludovic Zamenhof in 1887. He initially called the language simply la Lingvo Internacia (‘the international language’), but he wrote using the pseudonym Dr Esperanto and Esperanto quickly became the language’s accepted name. Alphabet Esperanto uses a Latin alphabet of 28 letters: 22 letters…… Continue reading Language sketch: Esperanto
Tag: Inflection: nouns
Welsh challenge (4)
This post is the 4th instalment of the Welsh leg of my current Celtic challenge. It covers chapter 3 of Colloquial Welsh. For earlier instalments, please see Welsh Archives – Language Miscellany Possession Welsh has no transitive verb meaning have. Instead, the verb mae is used with the preposition gyda (‘with’), or in speech often…… Continue reading Welsh challenge (4)
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)
Notes on English inflection
In this post I discuss some features of English inflection: English identifies 6 combinations of person (eg 1st person singular, 3rd person plural) but mostly distinguishes only 2 categories: (a) 3rd person singular versus (b) all others. the most prominent inflectional ending in English is -s, which serves as both:- the 3rd person singular ending…… Continue reading Notes on English inflection
Vowel harmony in case-marked forms of Hungarian personal pronouns
There is an oddity in how Hungarian vowel harmony works with personal pronouns. Many Hungarian suffixes undergo vowel harmony: when a case marker is suffixed to a noun, the suffix undergoes vowel harmony, but when a personal pronoun is suffixed to a case marking prefix, the prefix determines the vowel in the suffix. The same…… Continue reading Vowel harmony in case-marked forms of Hungarian personal pronouns
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
Singular folk—or is that plural
The excellent Feedback column in the Saturday edition of The Times (of London) often discusses language. On 4 October 2025, the column discussed complaints by disgruntled readers about the newspaper’s Polygon puzzle. This puzzle requires solvers to produce as many English words as possible from a list of 7 or 8 letters. Readers complained that…… Continue reading Singular folk—or is that plural
Surprising noun plurals in Russian
Two common Russian nouns have a plural form bearing no resemblance to their singular form. When different inflected forms of a word (for example, a noun) do not from the same root, the relationship between those roots is called suppletion. A well-known English example of suppletion is the verb go, which borrows its past tense…… Continue reading Surprising noun plurals in Russian
Some things I like about Hungarian
Hungarian differs from most European languages in several ways, partly because it is not a member of the Indo-European family of languages. Hungarian is a member of the Ugric branch of the Uralic language family. https://languagemiscellany.com/2024/01/the-uralic-languages/ This post covers some fascinating features of Hungarian: vowel harmony front and back vowels in deictic words possessive word…… Continue reading Some things I like about Hungarian