I hadn’t encountered this before: Place-Manner-Time vs. Time-Manner-Place languages, an attribute of the ordering of adpositional phrases. Examples from Wikipedia: English (PMT): I’m traveling to Munich by car today. German (TMP): Ich fahre heute mit dem Auto nach München. Japanese, which I’m trying to learn, is a TMP language like German. French and Finnish, which [...]
It doesn’t mean “If you don’t have a woman, you won’t have to cry”. Which really seemed like the most sensible reading to me.
At wals.info, compare linguistic features by geography (e.g.,: when do ordinal numbers become productive? first second three+th vs. first, two+th, three+th).
I’ve been posting to Facebook more than I’d like to; so I’m going to try to turn that into more short blog posts with less editing/polish.
Dream logs are fundamentally uninteresting to anybody but the dreamer.
Tagged cinematic-dreamEric Scheie asks Boxer the horse, “What’s the glue that holds society together?“: Is work personal and individualistic, or is it social and based on what’s good for the community as a whole? And most important, what is work? [...] After all, we don’t want to end up being like Boxer the horse. Say what you [...]
Peter Boothe asks twitter– Why do we hold Internet security systems to a high standard that no offline system has ever met? But it’s not so much that the standard is higher as that it’s different. Counterfeiting and theft are risks for physical currency that don’t even make sense for some forms of electronic payments. [...]
Musing about lexical analysis, language, and liberal education. Becoming big-headed: it’s good for you!
Today, in the car, while driving to swimming lessons, K said: “Daddy, people like to be right.” I agreed. “And they don’t like to be wrong.” Yes. “And they especially don’t like it when you tell them that they’re wrong.” Oh yes.
Wouldn’t be American; and wouldn’t be, at all. K has a love of history that we’ve been able to indulge by getting the Story Of the World audiobooks from the library. She’s listened to all four volumes, from prehistory through about 1995. (I was a bit reluctant to let her have modern history, 1860-1995, what [...]