Category: historical linguistics (page 1 of 2)

377: Mailbag of Uncomfortableness

The mail keeps coming, and we keep answering.

  • Is English really a dialect of Chinese?
  • Why do people say “uncomfortableness”, when we already have “discomfort”?
  • Are “ankh” and “anchor” related?
  • How does learning traditional languages help communities?
  • Is there a

358: Mailbag of Mallets

Again we tackle the questions that others dast not.

  • Why do all children seem to know the nyah nyah song?
  • Why do classic movie stars talk in that strange accent?
  • Do Chinese characters stay readable longer than English words?
  • Who

342: Mailbag of Vague

We are once again diving into our voluminous mailbag.

Was the QWERTY layout designed to slow you down? Is English a creole language? Why does a word keep popping up over and over after you first hear it? And what is …

339: How English Could Be Way Cooler

Other languages have good ideas too, you know.

Have you noticed something cool about another language, and wished English did that? Is there any feature of another language that you wish English had?

Daniel and Hedvig are engaging in a …

334: Mailbag of Darkness

It’s time once again to dig into our overflowing mailbag.

  • What’s the difference between a hill, a mountain, and a mount?
  • Why do we seem to add a negative suffix to positive words, and not the other

303: Creoles 2 (featuring John McWhorter, Knut Olawsky, & Ji-Soo Kweon)

We’re continuing our discussion of a controversial paper about how new languages get started.

When you start talking about creole languages, the linguistic becomes the political very quickly. So what are linguists saying about this work? And is there anything …

292: Mailbag of Destiny

We love taking questions, and for this episode, we’ve got a lot of them.

What’s behind the things we say, and why is language the way it is? Is calling someone a drop-kick secretly obscene? Why does Germany have so …

288: Letters Lost

English used to look a lot different.

We used to use a lot of letters that no longer exist. They had names like eth, wynn, thorn, and ash. Ben, Kylie, and Daniel talk about …

266: Names

What’s in a name?

Names contain a great deal of history, including our own personal history. Does your name have a meaning? How do names come about, and what are the conventions of naming in other places? And what about …

256: Numbers

One, two, three… Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

And yet different languages express numbers in very different ways. How are they handled in our brains? And how did –illion get to be the suffix for truly astronomical sums?

Linguist Daniel

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