Skeptophilia

Monday's post, about the difficulty of defining the term race , prompted a loyal reader of Skeptophilia  to ask if I'd ever heard of...

My M.A. is in historical linguistics, focusing particularly on northern European languages and how they interacted in (relatively) recent ti...

Sometimes I have thoughts that blindside me. The last time that happened was a couple of days ago, while I was working in my office and our ...

The southern tip of mainland Italy is called Calabria.  It's a strikingly beautiful place, containing three national parks ( Pollino Nat...

We were having dinner with our younger son a while back, and he asked if there was a common origin for the - naut  in astronaut  and the nau...

A recent study found that regardless how thoroughly AI-powered chatbots are trained with real, sensible text, they still have a hard time r...

An Introduction to Language  (by Victoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman, Third Edition, 1974) defines language  as "rule-governed arbitrary...

British science historian James Burke has a way of packing a lot of meaning into a small space. I still recall the first time I watched his...

My master's thesis is titled, "The Linguistic Effects of the Viking Invasions on England and Scotland," which should put it in...