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Schibboleth
STORIES say that during the second world war, Dutch soldiers used the name of the seaside resort Scheveningen as a shibboleth to identify German soldiers in their midst. German soldiers would pronounce the first three letters “sch” as “sh”, following German sound rules. (English speakers might do the same, partly on account of our familiarity […]
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Book review
READERS who missed it may be interested to check out this week’s review of Julie Barlow and Jean-Benoît Nadeau’s “Story of Spanish”. In other home notes, Johnson has been nominated as a Top Language Professional Blog, and bab.la is hosting a vote for number one. If internet contests are your kind of thing, the voting […]
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Of nations, peoples, countries and mínzú
DID Joe Biden insult China? The American vice-president has a habit of sticking his foot into his mouth, and in this case, the recent graduation speech he gave at the University of Pennsylvania inspired a viral rant by a “disappointed” Chinese student at Penn, Zhang Tianpu. What was Mr Biden’s sin? Was it Mr Biden’s […]
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English atop the Eurovision pile, yet again
LAST Saturday saw Denmark win the Eurovision Song Contest, the country’s third win in the contest’s history. A prototypically apple-cheeked blonde (pictured) took the trophy for her country, but she did so with the rather un-Danish name of Emmelie de Forest and the equally un-Danish title, “Only Teardrops”. The contest has always been about more […]
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Setting the record straight
IT IS rare that Johnson is compelled to respond to comments. But my last post, about the fun parallels in the hybrid development of English and Dravidian languages, seems to have stirred the passions of our readers. Many of them commented, dismissing the post as (at best) misguided and (at worst) a piece of neocolonial […]
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Eurasiatic?
THE Washington Post reports today that linguists have discovered a handful of “ultraconserved” words, some 15,000 years old. These are said to include “hand”, “give”, “bark” and “ash”. The paper is “Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia,” by Mark Pagela, Quentin D. Atkinson, Andreea S. Calude, and Andrew Meade in the Proceedings of the National Academy of […]