Monthly Archives: June 2022

In his pivotal treatise on the development of Latin into Italian De vulgari eloquentia “on vernacular eloquence”, composed circa 1302-05, medieval Italian poet and key figure in the history of the language Dante Alighieri divided the emerging Romance languages -which all descended from Vulgar Latin- according to their words for “yes”: Nam alii oc, aliiContinue reading “The alignment of the Romance languages”

“I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it.” – L’Étranger, Albert Camus My mother always shared with me the importance of looking to otherContinue reading “🌸”

The past couple of decades have seen China’s rise to global economic dominance at the expense, notably, of the integrity of the Western perspective on the other side. To the rest of the world, China presents itself very firmly as a superpower offering the world an alternative option to the tedious Western orthodoxy. They haveContinue reading “🐉🐲 The Linguistics of China’s Power 🧨⁉️”

… Native American philology … Get it? A p❤ssion for… (Amerindian philology/linguistics… because the institution of language is pretty much totally abstract and fluid to Native Americans, yet it never ends thanks to the Buzz-Concept infinity) The very nature of the concept of language varies wildly across the world, between language families. This means thatContinue reading “A passion for…”

The way we see flowers is coded for by the very name we assign them. According to Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, the “connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.” He asserted that there is no logical or intrinsic relationship between the nature or form of a linguistic “sign”, i.e. component of languageContinue reading “Flowers.”

I have put forth partly in jest a new name suggestion for the African continent, since the original Roman-derived name is technically offensive to them: read more here. The name I have suggested is Radikya, derived from the adjective “radical”, which has its etymological roots in the Latin word radix, itself meaning “root”. Moreover, theContinue reading “The Radikyial view of African linguistics”

The Turkic-speaking peoples really struggle with the Western, heavily Anglocentric order of the 21st century. It’s most certainly not a cultural clash, but rather an unfortunate, tragic linguistic one. Agreeable Turkic peoples live behind a haze of perturbation due to certain linguistic contrasts and incompatibilities between their languages and those which dominate in the West.Continue reading “Saving Turkicity”

“ I said, let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler: but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope. ” – George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 1876 🇬🇧 soul Etymology: of Germanic origin. OldContinue reading “🕯”

Francesco Petrarca was an Italian scholar and poet of early Renaissance Italy. His name is often anglicised as Petrarch. He is credited as having founded the 14th-century Italian Renaissance / il Rinascimento (“Re-birth”), a movement of medieval Europe centred in Italy and focused on reimagining and levelling up from the feats of classical antiquity, withContinue reading “The Petrarchan way”