Tag: Top dozen post

Odds and ends: English

This post deals with some small aspects of English, grouped under the following headings: Spelling pronunciation meanings mass noun or count noun? word or phrase word histories 1.    Spelling 1a. Bookkeeper Bookkeeper (and related bookkeeping) is one of the few English words with 3 double letters in a row: oo-kk-ee. https://whenyouwrite.com/ points out: an English…… Continue reading Odds and ends: English

Some similarities between Russian and German

I was 15 when I started learning Russian at school, after 4 years of learning German. Although there are many differences between German and Russian, my confidence grew early from discovering some similarities between those 2 languages. I discuss some of the similarities briefly below. 1. Cases Both languages have retained complex systems of case…… Continue reading Some similarities between Russian and German

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

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

Is the English language just French in disguise?

Bernard Cerquiglini’s 2024 book bears the provocative title «La langue anglaise n’existe pas» C’est du français mal prononcé (‘ “the English language doesn’t exist.” It is badly pronounced French.’) The title is from a quip by Clemenceau (presumably French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, 1841-1929). Cerquiglini emphasises that it is a quotation by putting quotation marks…… Continue reading Is the English language just French in disguise?

Disyllabic compound nouns in east and southeast Asia

In Chinese, many basic words are made up of one syllable, but many other words are compounds of 2 monosyllabic words. Many of those compounds were also borrowed into Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese, even though none of those three languages has any known genetic relationship to Chinese.   The following table lists a few of…… Continue reading Disyllabic compound nouns in east and southeast Asia

Great sound charts for 14 languages

There is a superb collection of sound charts at https://ielp.ehe.osu.edu/sep/interactive-ipa-charts They cover 14 languages: Arabic, Bengali, English, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Nepali, Persian, Spanish, Tamil, Turkish and Vietnamese. The document for each language contains: a chart showing the consonants used in that language, transcribed using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) another chart showing those…… Continue reading Great sound charts for 14 languages

Xmas with kids

Spending a week with our grandchildren between Christmas and New Year, I noticed a few things about how they use language. Strong verbs I came across 2 more examples of some creative formations of a past participle and of a simple past tense from strong verbs: our middle grandson (now 7 years 0 months) produced…… Continue reading Xmas with kids

Chinese characters in the Japanese writing system

People often say that Japanese is the language with the most complex writing system. This is partly because 4 different sets of characters are used in writing the language: logographic characters (representing words or morphemes) imported (with some subsequent changes) from Chinese many centuries ago (known as kanji ‘Chinese characters) a syllabary used to spell…… Continue reading Chinese characters in the Japanese writing system