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...

I have a great admiration for poets. They have an amazing way of collapsing a tremendous amount of punch into a small space.  The best poets...

How many languages are there in the world? Seems like it should be an easy question, right?  Not so much.  Just like the issue of biological...

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 ...

My master's degree is in historical linguistics, and one of the first things I learned was that it's tricky to tell if two words are...

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

I've written here before about the monumental difficulty of translating written text when you (1) don't know what the character-to-s...

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...