Spies

Dot writes: I’ve been reading again, thanks to a family trip to the library which allowed me an unaccustomed escape from the children’s section. I read Single and Single, by John Le Carre, The Telling, by Ursula Le Guin, Nothing is Black, by Deirdre Madden, and now another John Le Carre, A Perfect Spy. It’s [...]

Here, There, Where words and others

Ken writes:
The words ‘here’, ‘there’ and ‘where’ belong to a regular structure that is shared by a number of other words. I’ve arranged the ones I’m familiar with in the table below.

H (this place)
Th (that place)

Wh (which place)

ence (from (place))
Hence (from this)
Thence (from that place)

Whence (from which place?)

ither (to (place))
Hither (to this place)
Thither (to that [...]

‘Mama’ and ‘Papa’

Ken writes:
Via Language Log, I came across this comic.

It turns out this is a hypothesis by a linguist called Roman Jakobson and the comments on the original language log post link to an essay by R Trask expounding and defending the suggestion.
It’s ingenious!
p.s. sorry about the size of the image. You might need to [...]

Gene-ius

Dot writes: my official breastfeeding reading for today is an academic book I’m reviewing, but after a good start my ability to concentrate is flagging (also Frank is asleep on my lap and I’m getting pins and needles in my bum and typing at a funny angle so as not to rest my elbow on [...]

3D

Dot writes: there’s an article by Mark Cousins in the October issue of Prospect magazine (which Ken bought while he was away at the weekend, for reading on the ferry) about cinema in 3D. As it happens it uses as its main example the film Up. Ken and I saw Up in 3D but Hugh [...]

But is it Cornish? The identity of resurrected languages

Ken writes:
When the last speaker of a language dies, the language is said to be extinct (maybe that should be ‘fluent native speaker’, but I’m going with the more general condition). Can a language be resurrected? That is, can a language come to life again if people start speaking it again with sufficient fluency? I [...]

Birth Knowledge

Dot writes: ignorance may not be bliss, but reading can produce discontentment. I mentioned a few posts ago that I’ve started to find my steps mysteriously straying towards the midwifery section again. A bit over a week ago they strayed towards a book called Birthing Autonomy: Women’s Experiences of Planning Homebirth by Nadine Pilley Edwards [...]

Accents on the web

Dot writes: we’ve just been having fun listening to the recordings of speakers from different parts of Britain and Northern Island at the BBC Voices survey website. Have a listen to the interview clips from Shetland – they’re extraordinary. We’ve always wanted to visit Shetland and now we want to even more!

What is a sentence from a syntactic perspective?

Ken writes:
Spurred on by this, I’ve done some more research. I think I’ve found a definition of the sort they might have in mind in the appendix to John Lyons’ Chomsky (Harvester Press, 1977). It is a definition of ’sentence’ for the purposes of formal syntax and it doesn’t depend on any hidden semantic terms. [...]

Technology and Wisdom in balance

Ken writes: I’m reading Catherine Blyth’s ‘The Art of Conversation’ at the moment (I’ve just started, but so far it is very enjoyable). I was struck by a claim she attributes to Hannah Arendt (who I have never read…I’m not that sort of philosopher), namely that human technological prowess and human moral understanding have become [...]