Which Language Has the Most Words - Jun 2025
How many words do we have with wave, waves, wavey, wavelet and wavelets? Might Webster or Johnson have built a different tradition of dictionary making?
Is AI the End of Programming Languages? - May 2025
Karpathy and fans call English the hottest new programming language. I guess COBOL’s retro now.
Notes on Persianate India - Mar 2025
In the 1820s, the East India Company replaced Persian with English
How to Learn Persian - Mar 2025
Learning Tajiki Persian is faster and more eloquent!
Touring Older Persian Grammars - Feb 2025
Two hundred years of scholars and adventurers learned and taught Persian to yet more adventurers and scholars
On Russian Verb Morphology - Apr 2023
This is for advanced learners.
Taming Russian Word Stress - Mar 2023
This is for advanced learners.
Of Fossils and Rarer Russian Cases - Jul 2022
Russian has more than 6 cases!
Who Wrote the TY Books? - Aug 2019
I have a copy of Teach Yourself Turkish, which was first published in 1919 (see page 4.) Rather perplexing, because the author G.L. Lewis was born in 1920. The publisher itself (English University Press) was founded in 1938. Intriguing. His obituary says he only discovered Turkish in 1939. Stranger still, Wikipedia gives 1953.
Old English and Old Norse - Feb 2019
Old English and Norse were mutually inteligible, but OE literary culture blossomed centuries earlier with Christianization.
Germanic Ablaut - Jul 2017
Strong verbs are cool.
How to Learn Languages - May 2017
Here’s a rough sketch of my approach to language learning:
Uniquely Russian Terms - Aug 2015
A list of ‘untranslatable’ words and idioms.
Good Language Books - Apr 2015
List of books
Features of Archaic English - Feb 2014
Much of this applies to poetry, the Graveyard poets, Romantics, Restoration era poets etc. drank of this same fount.
Archaic Swedish Features - Feb 2014
Archaic Conjugations
- All verbs would take -en with I: I ären, I voren, I haden varit, I skolen vara, I måsten, I tror
- In the present, plurals are like the infinitive, except vi äro: vi hafva
- In the past, weak verbs had one form, while strong plurals would take -o, some with a different stem vowel (det fanns, de funnos) shared by the subjunctive.
- 1st. pl. imperative with -om: låtom oss tro
- 2nd pl. imperative with n: tron
- vara form perfect past with intransitive verbs: jag är uppstigen
- present subjunctive replaces infinitive’s a with -e (if not -a, same as infinitive)
- past subjunctive only exists with strong verbs, adding -e (to plural past stem)
Note verbs themselves were often spelled differently: hafva, blifva, skrifva etc.