Цитаты из произведения Развитие языка

Another area where languages often display erratic behaviour is what linguists call 'gender', by which they don't necessarily mean distinctions based on sex, but any classification imposed on nouns according to some of their essential properties. 'Masculine' versus 'feminine' is indeed one of the most common distinctions,…

Many people outside the field of linguistics are under the impression that there is an established consensus among linguists over the question of innateness. The reality, however, could not be more different. Let five linguists loose in a room and ask them to discuss innateness — chances are you will hear at least seven…

The original negation marker in English was ne, as in French. The modern word ‘not’ started out as a full-bodied ne-a-wiht ‘not-ever-thing’, or in other words ‘nothing-whatsoever’. This phrase was added to the simple ‘no’, in order to create an emphatic ‘no way’, ‘not a jot’ type of ‘no’. By the tenth century, ne-a-wiht…

Before the nineteenth century, musing about the history of languages and the relationships between them was the pastime of dilettanti, who often had rather rusty axes to grind. In 1690, for instance, a certain Pere Louis Thomassin wrote in all seriousness that French and Hebrew were so close to each other that 'one may…

In a session of the Academie Francaise in November 1843, an argument erupted between two distinguished Victors, the philosopher and educationalist Victor Cousin and the novelist Victor Hugo. The discussion began with a somewhat arcane debate on the merits and demerits of writing double consonants, but it soon developed…