Category Archives: Multilingualism
The Linguistic Isolation of Brazilians
From the comments section, a comment from a Brazilian physician, of all people: Brazilians do not understand anything in Spanish. A lot of Brazilians think they can understand Spanish due to the affinity of the languages, but when we try … Continue reading
Does Language Learning Carry Over to New Languages?
Not nearly as much as one might think. For instance, I am relatively well versed in the Romance languages. I can read Spanish quite well, but not fluently. I can read a bit of French. And I have studied reading … Continue reading
Great Site on Endangered Languages of Europe
Repost from the old site. Great site on endangered languages of Europe. Tapani Salinem, a Finnish linguist, has done a bang-up job on this stuff. This report was prepared for UNESCO. The last good report I read on this subject … Continue reading
Filed under Applied, Europe, Linguistics, Multilingualism, Regional, Reposts From The Old Site, Sociolinguistics
Dual Pronouns
Repost from the old site. We do not have dual pronouns in English anymore, and they have dropped out of my most other European languages too, but they are still found in some languages, including American Indian languages. In these … Continue reading
Filed under Aborigines, Amerindians, Anthropology, Applied, Austro-Tai, Austronesian, Blacks, Descriptive, Indo-European, Indo-Hittite, Inuit, Language Families, Language Learning, Language Samples, Linguistics, Multilingualism, Papuans, Philosophy, Race/Ethnicity, Reposts From The Old Site, Semantics, Sociolinguistics
Endangered Languages of Northeast Asia
Repost from the old site. Cool site. Very pessimistic, possibly overly so, but the situation is not one to be optimistic about. In contrast to the sister site about endangered languages in Europe, it seems that the languages of NE … Continue reading
Filed under Applied, Asia, Eurasia, Europe, Fascism, History, Language Learning, Linguistics, Modern, Multilingualism, NE Asia, Political Science, Regional, Reposts From The Old Site, Russia, Sociolinguistics, USSR
Mutual Intelligibility of Languages in the Slavic Family
There is much nonsense said about the mutual intelligibility of the various languages in the Slavic family. It’s often said that all Slavic languages are mutually intelligible with each other. This is simply not the case. Let us look first … Continue reading
How Learning One Language Well Helps You Learn Others
Repost from the old site. In the comments, the ever-perceptive dano notes: dano: The thing is, I’ve found that once you learn to speak a European language, and particularly a Latin-based one, you see similarities in many words across the … Continue reading
English Attacking Bahasa Indonesia in Indonesia
English is the global destroyer, taking out native languages here and there, right and left, over there and over here. I’ve never heard of it damaging actual national languages yet. Looks like it’s going to town on Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) … Continue reading
Polyglots – Riccardo Bertani
Polyglots are very interesting people. A polyglot is one who can speak more than 10 languages well. A great list of polyglots is here. The ability to be a polyglot seems to have a lot to do with genetics. Some … Continue reading
Filed under Linguistics, Multilingualism