Languages

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?

Touring Older Persian Grammars - Feb 2025

Two hundred years of scholars and adventurers learned and taught Persian to yet more adventurers and scholars

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.

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.