Tag Archives: language

Lumpers And Splitters

Posted on June 15, 2022 by nathanalbright

When it comes to many aspects of life, people can be divided between lumpers and splitters. Lumpers are people who try to put things together, who see the connections between that which others view as disparate things. Splitters, on the … Continue reading →

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How Old Is Azeri?

Posted on May 2, 2022 by nathanalbright

This morning I had the chance to read someone with a scholarly interest in the Azeri language talk about their own personal reflections of Azeri and its connection (via its shared particles with various other languages) and the implications of … Continue reading →

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Babies, Bathwater, And Babel

Posted on March 15, 2022 by nathanalbright

For those of us who are interested in the Tower of Babel project [1], it is common that we will read writings that have been translated from Russian that seek to discuss the long-term history of human languages. Various different … Continue reading →

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On The Productivity Of Theories

Posted on February 12, 2022 by nathanalbright

How do theories show themselves to be productive? As someone who reads a fair amount of material about linguistics, one often finds situations where writers seek to determine the deep relationships between long-separated languages as a way of showing the … Continue reading →

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Rivers Of Babylon

Posted on December 6, 2021 by nathanalbright

One of my more obscure interests is a fascination with the history of languages and their origins and development. For a long time people have sought to make connections between various languages in seeking to discover how it is that … Continue reading →

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A Law That Everybody Breaks

Posted on October 24, 2021 by nathanalbright

[Note: This is the prepared text for a sermonette given to the United Church of God congregation in Portland on Sabbath, October 23, 2021.] Today, I am going to talk about a law in the Bible that everyone breaks. In … Continue reading →

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An Island Unto Itself?

Posted on July 7, 2021 by nathanalbright

One of the most enduring jokes that has been made–a version of it goes all the way back to Shakespeare’s Merchant Of Venice–about the English is the way that they are so relentlessly monolingual. Similar things have been said about … Continue reading →

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When A Continent Rides The Struggle Bus

Posted on January 25, 2021 by nathanalbright

While I was looking for books on another subject, I noticed that four different accounts of the proceedings of the House Committee on International Relations over the past two decades featured the word struggle in them. All four were connected … Continue reading →

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Book Review: Fluent In 3 Months

Posted on November 2, 2020 by nathanalbright

Fluent In 3 Months: How Anyone At Any Age Can Learn To Speak Any Language From Anywhere In The World, by Beny Lewis This book has at least a little bit of the gimmicky nature of it, and it participates … Continue reading →

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Book Review: Word Drops

Posted on October 16, 2020 by nathanalbright

Word Drops: A Sprinkling Of Linguistic Curiosities, by Paul Anthony Jones This is a good example of the sort of book that can come easily from the twitter age, and that is a collection of very short texts with some … Continue reading →

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