Is Ebonics a language? It was popularized as a distinct language spoken by some American African-Americans in the 1980’s and 90’s, yet another note in the culture war symphony. It’s interesting, and ironically humorous that linguist John McWhorter refers to … Continue reading
When I learned that world-famous linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky would teach a class at the University of Arizona, I signed up. A lot of people from the northeast come to Tucson for the winter, but most of them … Continue reading
Noam Chomsky, giant of contemporary thought and inventor of transformational grammar and computational linguistics, has a new book out and it’s mercifully on linguistics, not politics. The core idea in his new monograph is that humans understand language hierarchically, an … Continue reading
This sci-fi adventure gets points for creativity. A small crew from earth investigates an alien ship somewhere out in the Oort cloud. The stimulating questions include, how would you communicate with aliens, and, what are the aliens like? Usually in … Continue reading
I was listening to a lecture on linguistics and the subject was Proto-Indo-European, (PIE) the prehistoric ancestor of English and many other languages. Words in the PIE language are derived from comparative analysis of all known existing and historical languages in a … Continue reading