I have no idea what this site is about other than being a showcase for texts in apparently invented languages; this recent post, for example, begins: Aża cīfir zuoj Thorenur khioj thurenur, řa duiker. Siřover taekar ofo, ici se laima şiekhar ifi koiden, siekar, beifir ata zirenur roidir, vu go ifi sibe. Eçe aba diamur […]| languagehat.com
Ben Yagoda is an old LH favorite (e.g., 2015, 2022), so I was delighted to see that last week’s New Yorker included an essay of his (archived) on H. W. Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. It starts: In 1940, St. Clair McKelway typed a memo to William Shawn, The New Yorker’s managing editor […]| languagehat.com
Victor Mair’s Language Log post starts off with Japanese 奴隷 dorei ‘slave,’ of which Mair says “Coming at 奴隷 from the Sinitic side, my instinct is to read 奴隷 as beginning with an n-” (in Mandarin it’s núlì) and continues “So I started to ask around how is it that Japanese has a d- initial […]| languagehat.com
I’ve started reading Yuri Annenkov’s 1934 novel Повесть о пустяках [A story about trifles], set in Russia in the first couple of decades of the century; it was looked on with disfavor by almost everyone, because not only did it use suspiciously modernist devices (montage, ornamental prose, etc.), but the “trifles” are two revolutions, WWI, […]| languagehat.com
Taylor Jones, known around the internet as Language Jones, has a twenty-minute YouTube video thoughtfully called “Are we WRONG about most FAMOUS LINGUISTICS experiment??” If I were modeling my style on his, I might have called this post “LINGUISTICS INFLUENCER is TOO WOKE — and WRONG about NAMES!!” But instead I went with the modest […]| languagehat.com
Étienne de La Vaissière’s Acta Orientalia article “A Military Origin for New Persian?” (open access) attracted my attention because of my long-standing interest in Persian and its history. The abstract: The question of the transition from Middle Persian to New Persian has been hotly debated. This article attempts to answer two questions: who spoke New […]| languagehat.com
You’d think I would have learned long ago to associate Northwestern University Press with daring, off-the-beaten-path publications that are often right up my alley, considering that they put out translations of Veltman’s Selected Stories (translated by James J. Gebhard, 1988) and Andrei Bely’s Kotik Letaev (translated by Gerald J. Janecek, 1999; I wrote about the […]| languagehat.com
In this recent comment by ktschwarz, the word quandary struck me, not only because it had undergone a change of stress but because I realized I didn’t know where it was from. Turns out nobody else does either, and the OED’s etymology section (entry revised 2007) is so interesting I thought I’d share it: Origin […]| languagehat.com
Remember when I recently announced the publication of Paul Postal’s new book attacking Chomsky and generative grammar? Well, Slavo/bulbul has been reading it and getting increasingly grumpy, and Slavo’s grumpiness produces such eloquence I have no recourse but to quote his Facebook posts in extenso (I have added itals and blockquotes for clarity and fixed […]| languagehat.com
This is another of those words that are kind of words, being in the dictionary, but also kind of not, since they’re not actually used or understood by anyone (except the very occasional person who decides to deploy them). I’m reading a very interesting book about Bakhtin that has the admirable quality of providing all […]| languagehat.com
Drew Johnson’s “The Eloquent Vindicator in the Electric Room” is a thought-provoking piece about the assassination of Congressman James M. Hinds in 1868 (and if you’re thinking “Who?”… well, that’s his point); what brings it here is this paragraph: His wife ran a rummage sale posing as an antique store. She and I spoke for […]| languagehat.com
It’s a lot spiffier than this antiquated relic of the 2000s, but it covers a congruent mix of language-related topics. The About page features a Chekhov quote and a list of beliefs (Dogs are the best people; All English is Good English; No such thing as a wrong pronunciation); topics include phrasal verbs, No Irish […]| languagehat.com
My wife asked me why matrimony meant marriage whereas patrimony meant something entirely different, and I had no answer for her, so I googled around. Wiktionary is no help: From Old French matremoine, from Latin mātrimōnium (“marriage, wedlock”), from mātri(s) (“mother”) + -mōnium (“obligation”). By surface analysis, matri- + -mony. Compare patrimony. So I tried […]| languagehat.com
Jesmyn Ward’s 2011 novel Salvage the Bones was one of my birthday presents this year, and I just got through reading it. If you want the plot laid out, you can read the Wikipedia entry or Parul Sehgal’s NY Times review (archived). Me, I don’t read books for plot, and all I can tell you […]| languagehat.com
I saw a reference to bootleg records and wondered, for the hundredth time, why they were called that. Obviously it had to do with bootleg booze, but why was that called “bootleg”? And what was the chronology? So I went to the OED, which happily revised its entry just this year (I’ll interleave the corresponding […]| languagehat.com
Nitsuh Abebe writes in the NY Times (archived) about a kerfuffle that had hitherto escaped me but is obviously in my wheelhouse, “Whose Punctuation Is More Human: Yours or A.I.’s?”: There are countless signals you might look for to determine whether a piece of writing was generated by A.I., but earlier this year the world […]| languagehat.com
I heard a piece by the American composer and clarinetist Derek Bermel and liked it, so I looked him up and discovered he’d written a piece called “Language Instruction” that you can read about, and hear a snippet of, here. One of the quotes on that page is an excerpt from Allan Kozinn’s NY Times […]| languagehat.com
I was over at XIX век and happened to glance at the list of Russian literature sites in the right margin, and my eye fell on the obdurately lowercase obdurodon. When I clicked through, I found an amazing collection of “Digital humanities projects,” many of them Russian-related, from The annotated Afanas′ev library (“Selected Russian fairy […]| languagehat.com
I find it hard to believe I’ve never posted about rebetika, since not only do I love the music (when I was in Athens I sought out a dusty record store where I could buy some LPs I then had to lug back to New York) but the word itself is very interesting. For one […]| languagehat.com
As I said back in 2014, John Berryman is one of my favorite American poets, and I welcome the imminent appearance of Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs; Shane McCrae, who edited it and wrote the introduction, has a Paris Review essay about it from which I offer a few excerpts: It has taken me […]| languagehat.com
Seamus Perry reviews Zachary Leader’s Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker for the LRB (Vol. 47 No. 16 · 11 September 2025; archived), and I find myself enchanted — Ellmann’s book may have been the first literary biography I ever read, and just picking the hefty volume off my shelf makes me want to reread both it and Joyce. Perry begins:| languagehat.com
maraow| languagehat.com
Hitch.| languagehat.com
Some items I’ve run across lately:| languagehat.com
Archives| languagehat.com
Archives| languagehat.com
My wife and I always enjoy Bill Danielson’s weekly nature columns in our local paper, the Hampshire Gazette; he usually writes about birds, but this week it was an oddly specialized topic and an unusual word I didn’t remember encountering before:| languagehat.com
Mandarin with Taiwanese Characteristics.| languagehat.com
jack morava| languagehat.com