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?

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!

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.

Uniquely Russian Terms - Aug 2015

A list of ‘untranslatable’ words and idioms.

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.