“‘It seems very pretty,’ she said when she had finished it, ‘but it’s rather hard to understand!’” — Alice’s reaction on reading, in mirror writing, “Jabberwocky” in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass ’Twas brillig, and the slithy tovesDid gyre and gimble in the wabe;All mimsy were the borogoves,And the mome raths outgrabe. So begins […]
Language
Posted inLife + Outdoors
The Mystery of the Wiyot and Yurok Languages
Take a look at the accompanying map, which shows the extent of the so-called “Algic” superfamily of Indigenous languages. (Algic from Allegheny + Atlantic.) Most of these belong to the Algonquian family of about 30 languages, all descended from the Proto-Algonquian that was spoken about 3,000 years ago and whose speakers are now found from […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Love I Language
“With this ring, I thee wed.” These words are spoken some 2.5 million times a year in the U.S. — or up to twice that, when both parties to a marriage give rings. Notice anything odd about that sentence? “I” is the subject (S), “thee” the object (O) and “wed” the verb (V), for an […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Language: 100,000 or 1 Million Years Old?
Seriously! My headline isn’t hyperbole — that’s what linguists are arguing about. This isn’t like the age of the universe, with experts debating whether it’s 13.7 or 13.8 billion years old. Same thing, for most of us. This is a serious, tenfold difference of opinion. If you’re in the “continuity” camp, you believe that language […]
Posted inNews
COVID Misinformation Plagues California’s Indigenous Speakers
Ismael Patia and his family arrived at a COVID-19 vaccine clinic in downtown Fresno on a recent Saturday afternoon. His decision to get vaccinated had been a difficult one. But he finally was persuaded by an interpreter who talked to him in his native language, Mixteco, and eased his fears. “I’ve been hearing about people […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
The Golden Horde
A virgin carrying a gold nugget on her head could walk unmolested from one end of the empire to another.” — Persian historian Ata-Malik Juvayni (1226-1283) Within 50 years of his death in 1227, the Mongol Empire founded by Genghis Khan grew into a vast, contiguous empire under his four eldest sons, each of whom […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Interpreting Equity During a Pandemic
One of my first memories interacting with other children in our community is of having my older brother, Mauro, interpret for me as we were playing — he was attending school and picking up English much faster than I was. We would migrate back and forth from Mexico where my abuelita y abuelo (grandma and […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Black English
“Black English … is a kind of tune-up of the English language. Some of the needless complexities are wiped away, just as happened all along the journey from Proto-Indo-European to English.” — Linguist John McWhorter Thanks to rap music, the internet, countless TV shows and movies, and just living in a mixed society, we’re all […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
No Celtic? Blame the Volcano
Celtic is virtually absent in the English language, despite the fact that almost everyone in what is now England spoke a branch of Celtic before Germanic speakers invaded the country following the departure of Roman legions in 410 A.D., as I discussed in “The Weirdness of English, Part 2” (March 16, 2017). The exception is […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Embellishing English
Once when the world was young — 1978 to be more precise — I headed out alone from the northern Thai city of Chiang Rai, fancying myself an anthropologist on the verge of discovering new peoples in the mythical “Golden Triangle” region. So much for the hubris of youth. Turned out I was walking into […]
Posted inNews
In Karuk
Elaina Supahan Albers remembers well what her husband, Phil Albers Jr., said that day eight years ago when she told him she was pregnant with their first child. She was 20 and he was 23. They both worked hotel jobs and attended Southern Oregon University, although Phil was about to graduate. They were at home […]