The special position (splendid isolation) of English within the Germanic language group seems to cause peculiar interest of some Anglophones with the supposed closeness and mutual intelligibility of the more knit-together groups of IndoEuropean like Romance or Slavic. You know, English is so out-of-place, so unlike any other, that the very idea of people understanding [...]
Even if I were a real linguist I would still abhor fine-tuning X-Bar grammar or Optimality Theory or any other highly formalised framework relying instead on gut feeling and common sense. And I sure wouldn’t focus on written language (you see, even today there’s a written language bias in academic linguistics), as a lot of [...]
Exactly as predicted, putting the word “whore” in the title of the previous entry proved to be a brilliant strategy. It has already brought me my first genuine spam comment and the first hit from google search engine (yeah, the guy typed in “whore” and ended up here). Oh, joys of blogging. UPDATE: and now [...]
… or some diversity in profanity. Isn’t that a catchy title? First let me explain. Some posts ago I promised to devote the very next post to Polish maledicta (that’s proper English for “bad words” if you didn’t know; also the title of my favourite scholarly journal). That promise wasn’t fulfilled then, which teaches you [...]
