Someone on Quora linked to the Wikipedia article on the ‘Canaanite shift’:

In historical linguistics, the Canaanite shift is a sound change that took place in the Canaanite dialects, which belong to the Northwest Semitic branch of the Semitic languages family. This sound change caused Proto-NW-Semitic *ā (long a) to turn into ō (long o) in Proto- ( Read more... )

I just found out that Czech has “1 kráva; 5 krav” while Slovak has “1 krava; 5 kráv” with exactly opposite vowel length distribution in those two forms. Amusing :)

( Read more... )

If an opportunity has passed, you might say in English, “That ship has sailed.”

In German, it’s “Der Zug ist abgefahren” (That train has left).

Interesting that the metaphor is quite similar, except for the choice of vehicle.

A while ago, I saw an English insurance policy (I think it was) and was struck by how clear the language seemed to me, compared to what I’m used to in German.

I don’t remember the details, but the language style was along the lines of (if it had been for a mortgage), “If you do not pay your instalments on time, you are at risk of losing your house ( Read more... )

The wardrobe in the bedroom: an interesting article in John Wells’s phonetic blog, about juncture or syllabification and how it influences the difference between pairs such as nitrate and night rate or great ape and grey tape.

With a side discussion on how some (including Prof. Wells and I) pronounce words such as bedroom, beetroot, and wardrobe ( Read more... )

I came across this Romanian Wikipedia article on Cetatea Albă street in Chișinău (while looking for the diacriticful spelling of a Postcrosser’s address), and what struck my eye was this bit:

Strada Cetatea Albă (până în 1991 str. Krasnodonskaia) se află în sectorul Botanica, cartierul Muncești. (emphasis mine)

That reminded me of Sursilvan ( Read more... )

At least twice in recent days, I’ve seen people using “in dem” and “indem” incorrectly (I think one each of the two possible directions of mix-up).

It should be simple, really: the two-word one is the more literal “in which”; the one-word one is the fossilised “by” indicating the means:

“Er öffnete den Kofferraum, in dem er das Schloss ( Read more... )

Aufnahmen von jemandem, der durch seinen Stimmbruch hindurch immer wieder denselben Satz „Das Pferd frisst keinen Gurkensalat“ aufnahm. Man vergleiche die sich verändernde Tonhöhe (die auch in einer Tabelle auf der Seite dargestellt wird).

Recordings of a boy who recorded the same (German) sentence over and over again during the period where his ( Read more... )

LanguageLog had an interesting entry on situations where both it’s and its are grammatically correct, and result in a sentence with essentially the same meaning.