Fieldwork hostility, written 1 day ago, Mikko Korhonen's history Finno-Ugrian Language Studies in Finland 1828–1918 (Helsinki: Societas Scientarum Fenica, 1986) has a number of interesting anecdotes, but this one proved a bit disconcerting considering that tomorrow I leave for a month of fieldwork...

Looking at the languages and cultures of East Asia.

Classical Tibetan language, translation and reading Tibetan Buddhist texts.

Bilingual Radio, written 2 days ago, Today we have a guest post from James P. in Chile: I was listening to Catalan radio the other day (long story: short version, I'm thinking of whether to live in Spain and if I can be bothered with learning Catalan or whether it would just get mixed up in my Spani...

SPEECHES OLD AND NEW., written 15 hours ago, John McWhorter in The New Republic has a typically thoughtful and interesting discussion of "Why political oratory sounds so weird." He starts off:If Abraham Lincoln were brought back to life, one thing that would throw him, other than electric ...

Observations on language use in the world.

JLPT2 Practice Test #1, written 1 week ago, I took my first practice test for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) level 2 the other day.  I scored a 70%.  To pass, you need 60% or above, so I passed!  My goal is to pass the real test with 90% or above.  The test is in December so I onl...

Grammar-writing group (2) - general properties, written 4 days ago, It's yellow everywhere in Canberra - it's Wattle Day. Meanwhile, inside the honeycomb Coombs building at ANU, the grammar-writing group wrestled with Ulrike Mosel's article, 'Grammaticography: The art and craft of writing grammars',...

Clarity through Complexity, written 5 days ago, A golden tongue gets you noticed, but evolution-wise it may be a draw, getting as much resentment as admiration.
 
 Thanks to working on this blog, much has become clear to me that once seemed hopelessly obscure, but there are still poi...

Automatic Language Growth, written 2 weeks ago, Recently, Scott over at Journey to Thai has added several posts about his experiences at a school in Bangkok, which uses an immersive approach called "Automatic Language Growth". Via one of his YouTube links of the Bangkok school, I ran acros...

About Unicode and historic writing systems

Did that really happen?, written 1 day ago, For the first time in over a year, I saw Lance. He's one of our senior Latinists, but spends so little time teaching that he's rarely in; in three years I think he'll have taught three classes, maybe four. But on one of our trips to the departmental common...

saba and savta, written 3 days ago, There's a certain Hebrew kinship term that I've been putting off writing about because it's rather complicated. So I thought I'd write about saba סבא - "grandfather" and savta סבתא - "grandmother" instead, because they seemed much simple...

Conquering the world one language at a time.

Journal Question #2, written 3 days ago, I want to start off saying that if sometime today you do not get a comment on your post for the first post that is because I never saw it and you got a zero for the first assignment. You need to make sure that I can see your page by posting on my blog somewhe...

Audio... Visual, written 5 days ago, I love Pimsleur and Michel Thomas, but it would be nice to have a little written info to go with them. With Learn In Your Car and a few other programs, you get a transcript, or can download one. But as a rule, if you find a program with both a visual and an audio...

Expecting your baby in style, written 1 week ago, My best friend who is expecting her very first baby has been trying to shop around for maternity clothes in her neighbourhood stores and bemoaned the fact that there are very limited choices.   To her, the clothes were frumpy and dull looking and be...

summer holiday, written 3 weeks ago, Summer holiday: 15 august - 15 september. See you in autumn!

New Aramaic T-Shirts at Aramaic Designs, written 1 month ago, Liz is Aramaic Designs' newest team member, and has already begun to craft things of beauty by drawing inspiration from the language. If you would like to commission her for a tattoo design or art piece, please email in to us here for a q...

Shock horror: DJs occasionally mention alcohol, written 19 hours ago, Today's edition of the free paper Metro contains a story entitled 'DJs 'encouraging drinking'' which states:Radio presenters widely encourage drinking, a study warns today. DJs use language that celebrates excessive drinking with ...