Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
This blog column has existed for a month. It was launched with the idea that it would attract questions and comments. If this happens, at the end of each month the rubric “Monthly Gleanings” will appear. Although in March I have not been swamped with the mail, there is enough for a full post. Also, one question was asked privately, but in connection with the blog, so that I think I may answer it here.
by Anatoly Liberman Modern English is swamped with words borrowed from other languages. One does not have to be a specialist to notice the presence of the Romance element in it or to guess that samovar has come from Russian and samurai, from Japanese. It is the details that, as usual, pose problems. Not only […]
by Anatoly Liberman Etymology has a place in the world because people want to know why a certain combination of sounds carries the meaning accepted by their community but, as a rule, have no clue to the answer. However, the degree of opacity differs from word to word. Compounds like newspaper and daredevil are more […]
by Anatoly Liberman The entries in the great Oxford English Dictionary (OED) reveal, although, naturally, in broad outline, the documented history of thousands of words. Some of them surfaced in texts more than a millennium ago, others emerged in Chaucer’s works and later, and still others were added to the vocabulary of English within the […]
There was a time when historical linguistics was one of the most prestigious disciplines in the humanities. At school, Latin and Classical Greek were shoved down young boys’ unwilling throats, and it seemed natural to look at languages with the eyes of a historian. Early in the 19th century, regular sound correspondences between languages were […]