Repost: The Classification of the Vietnamese Language
This ran first a long time ago, but I just sold an ad on this post, so I decided to repost it. Rereading it, it’s a great Historical Linguistics post. One of the reasons that I am doing this post is...
View ArticleSticky: Christmas Fund Drive for Beyond Highbrow
Scroll down past this post to see the newest posts on the site. Sorry I have not been writing recently, but I had a setback and I have been very down over it. I sincerely hope you all had a great...
View ArticleDiglossia in China
Dear Robert I have no basis on which to agree or disagree with your assessment of the linguistic situation in China. However, aren’t nearly all Chinese born after 1949 sufficiently conversant with...
View ArticleUpdate: A Reworking of Chinese Language Classification
If you want to know where I have been the past few days, I have been working on this piece. I work on it for hours every day. So far, I have put in over 500 hours on this piece. That’s over three...
View ArticleFake Controversies, Fake Settled Questions, and Ideological Authoritarianism...
There is a lie going around that the dialect/language question is controversial in Linguistics. It really isn’t. Most linguists have a pretty good idea of where to draw the line. If you don’t believe...
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A Few Words on Language Endangerment
Carlos Lam: Congrats! However, isn’t language death a rather standard occurrence among societies? It is, but we linguists don’t really like it. It is quite a debate going on, but the bottom line seems...
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Is There a Language That is (Nearly) Impossible to Learn to Speak Without...
Answer from Quora: I recently talked to a man who is learning Min Nan, which is a Sinitic language often called a dialect of Chinese. He told me that Min Nan speakers say that the tones are so hard...
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Simplification of Language with Increasing Civilization: A Result of Contact...
Nice little comment here on an old post, Primitive People Have Primitive Languages and Other Nonsense? I would like to dedicate this post to my moronic field of study itself, Linguistics, which...
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The Chinese Language: The Wily Tiger That Cannot Be Tamed
Putonghua is the official version of Mandarin which the Communist government determined was to be the official language of the nation. It was created in 1949 and modeled mostly but not entirely on the...
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Linguistic “Science”: Let’s Get the Scientists out of Science and Let the...
As you saw in a previous article, the Chinese government, against all reason and for purely dishonest political motives, lies and says there is only one Chinese language, when in fact linguistic...
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Massive Update of A Reworking of Chinese Language Classification
My Internet enemies (you know who you are) love to rip me to pieces over this stuff, but I suspect that is because they operate under the cover of anonymity plus the general loud-mouthed jerk “troll...
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What Race Is This Person (Singapore)?
An interesting phenotype from Singapore. This is the aunt of a friend of mine. The family is from Singapore. They are part of an ethnic group called the Pernakans, a Southern Chinese group that moved...
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A Look at the Classical Chinese Language
Method and Conclusion. See here. Results. A ratings system was designed in terms of how difficult it would be for an English-language speaker to learn the language. In the case of English, English was...
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A Look at the Dônđän Wu Language
Method and Conclusion. See here. Results. A ratings system was designed in terms of how difficult it would be for an English-language speaker to learn the language. In the case of English, English was...
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A Look at the Min Nan Language
Method and Conclusion. See here. Results. A ratings system was designed in terms of how difficult it would be for an English-language speaker to learn the language. In the case of English, English was...
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A Look at the Mandarin Language
This piece ran earlier, but it underwent a huge revision to improve it and this is the new, improved version in case you missed it the first time. Method and Conclusion. See here. Results. A ratings...
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A Look at the Cantonese Language
Method and Conclusion. See here. Results. A ratings system was designed in terms of how difficult it would be for an English-language speaker to learn the language. In the case of English, English was...
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The Roots of the Alphabet(s)
Probably most of you do not know that we are all using a variant of the ancient Phoenician alphabet. Actually I am not sure if that is precisely true, as I think the Phoenician alphabet was preceded by...
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Is There a Language That Is Almost Impossible to Learn Without Growing Up...
A question was recently asked on Quora. Here is my answer. Hello, I recently talked to a Westerner who is learning Min Nan, which is a Sinitic language often called a dialect of Chinese. He already...
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Some Arguments Against Using Mutual Intelligibility as a Criterion in...
KIRINPUTRA writes in response to this piece: I think Lindsay is right in using mutual intelligibility as the criterion for determining what’s a language. I also think that intelligibility can be real...
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