Last Friday marked a momentous occasion for the Maltese language: at a fancy shindig at the Valletta Campus of the University of Malta, a new national dictionary of Maltese was unveiled. Edited by Michael Spagnol and Dwayne Ellul and access…
Last Friday marked a momentous occasion for the Maltese language: at a fancy shindig at the Valletta Campus of the University of Malta, a new national dictionary of Maltese was unveiled. Edited by Michael Spagnol and Dwayne Ellul and access…
Last Friday marked a momentous occasion for the Maltese language: at a fancy shindig at the Valletta Campus of the University of Malta, a new national dictionary of Maltese was unveiled. Edited by Michael Spagnol and Dwayne Ellul and access…
In a recent paper (Gatt 2025), Kurstin Gatt examines the perception of Malta in the imagination of its Arab neighbors and, by extension, their language. Specifically, Kurstin looks at Arabic idioms, proverbs, and sayings featuring Malta, an…
My (at this point future) wife is currently writing her dissertation that involves late antique rhetoric and theology and their view of women. To avoid going crazy dealing with medieval Latin, she regularly switches to reading more theoreti…
In the introduction to his Urban Jamaican Creole: Variation in the Mesolect (Benjamins 1999), Peter L. Patrick writes (emphasis and annotation mine): I was somewhat stunned to read these words, not because I learned anything new, quite the
A few weeks back, an article titled "Interactions Among Morphology, Word Order, and Syntactic Directionality: Evidence from 55 Languages" (henceforth: Li & Liu 2025) came across my link aggregators. It checked a few boxes for me: it had "wo…
A few weeks back, an article titled "Interactions Among Morphology, Word Order, and Syntactic Directionality: Evidence from 55 Languages" (henceforth: Li & Liu 2025) came across my link aggregators. It checked a few boxes for me: it had "wo…
To be quite honest, I did not want to address the global snafu that is the new Slovak "Official Language Act" ("Zákon o štátnom jazyku" 357/2009). First, Slovak politics disgusts me. There is no left - the main ruling party may talk the tal…
To be quite honest, I did not want to address the global snafu that is the new Slovak "Official Language Act" ("Zákon o štátnom jazyku" 357/2009). First, Slovak politics disgusts me. There is no left - the main ruling party may talk the tal…
Fascinating.Wild, even. It gets curiouser! In neighboring Indo-Aryan languages there exists a very similar type of echo-compounding: what is even more interesting is that there is a clear areal split as to what the initial consonant of the
It seems to me that this kind of reduplication is a very surface phenomenon that can cross constituent lines with aplomb: "You're GOING TO going to Japan??!" It reminds me of fucative-infixation: "Don't be so inde*@#$pendent."(Hey, cool, th…