a linguist writes about Spanish
By now I’m well into the “c” section of Spanish Word Histories and Mysteries. This is decent progress, since in my previous post inspired by this book I was only in the “b’s”. However, my perusal ground to a halt yesterday when I read about the English word cedilla, which is a straight borrowing of […]
Yesterday I made good headway in Spanish Word Histories and Mysteries: thirteen words, many of which will be useful grist for the mill of my next book. I’ve titled this post “Much ‑ado about nothing” because the -ado or -ada endings of three of these words — armada, bastinado (from Spanish bastonada), and avocado — […]
My (adult) children still remember that when they they were schoolchildren, if they left the house in the morning but ran back a minute later crying “I forgot my lunch!” I would always say, “You didn’t FORGET your lunch, you REMEMBERED your lunch”. This undoubtedly got old after a while. Anyway, today I realized that […]
After more months than I ever would have imagined, I have finally finished taking notes on David Crystal’s The Story of English in 100 Words. As I had expected, this book was an invaluable first step in my research for the analogous book about Spanish that I plan to write. Now I will move on […]
[Note to the reader: I wrote this post two weeks ago but apparently forgot to publish it! So here you go — better late than never.] It’s been so long since I’ve worked on my new book (my current excuse is excessive travel) that when I finally sat down yesterday to get back to work, […]
I’ve given up on often. When I was growing up I was taught that the t in often is silent, and that pronouncing the word as ‘off-ten’ was a mark of a poor education. Merriam-Webster relates the silent t in often to those in soften, hasten, and fasten. Apparently the t in often was originally […]
After taking some weeks off for summertime fun with my family I am now back to research for my third book. I’ve continued to work my way through David Crystal’s The Story of English in 100 Words — still inspirational and intimidating. But I’ve also taken a detour to devour Laura Spinney’s book Proto: How […]
As a first step in research for my new book I have continued to work my way through David Crystal’s inspirational The Story of English in 100 Words. I hit the 25-word mark yesterday, and thought this would be a good time to blog about what I’ve learned since my previous post, which covered Crystal’s […]
As I explained in my first blog post about my planned third book, David Crystal’s book The Story of English in 100 Words inspired me to tackle this project, and studying his book is the first item on my research to-do list. Since then, I’ve gotten to work. So far, reading The Story of English […]
Now that I’m not planning to teach this fall, my longstanding idea for a third book about Hispanic linguistics has jumped off the back burner and into the front of my brain. My inspiration for this project is David Crystal’s The Story of English in 100 Words (St. Martin’s Press, 2011). Crystal’s book is 256 […]