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In Thomas Johnson’s updated 1636 edition of John Gerard’s The Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes, there is an image comparing the ‘true’ and ‘feigned’ figures of ginger. Johnson explains that ‘the world has been deceived’ by the fake picture, circulated by another botanist, and so he is including it here alongside with the real […]
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We all use language every day: not only to communicate thoughts and ideas to other people, but also for our internal monologue and, some might argue, for organizing thought. But what are the inner workings of human language and what makes it different from animal communication? Professional linguists study these questions in their finest detail, […]
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Can Writing Academic Papers be Fun? Here’s a questionnaire for beginning and mid-career academics: If you answered yes to any of these questions, you are the target audience of Academic Writing Demystified: Publish and Thrive. If you are the owner of a cheese shop, well, perhaps not, but who knows, you may be wanting to […]
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How is it that any child, anywhere, can acquire any of the world’s estimated 6,000 languages, in a matter of only a few years? This mystery has long intrigued scholars as well as those who take care of young children. Each of these thousands of languages varies from each of the others in many ways—for […]
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The New Cambridge History of the English Language represents a second edition of the original Cambridge history published in the 1990s. Much has happened in English historical linguistics in the last three decades and so it was felt that a new history should reflect these shifts in research evident in current historical studies. Specifically, the […]
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2: How the Chinese Greet One Another? The title of this entry may sound like the title of a beginner’s Chinese language course featuring the expression ni hao 你好 as a simple greeting. However, we will show that that greeting one another in Chinese is far more complex than what meets the eye, and appropriately […]
Read More1: Overview In this blog series, we will provide an overview of the representative features of Chinese politeness in daily interaction. Instead of discussing conventional topics, such as the use of honorifics in business meetings, the famous concept of ‘face’ and other phenomena typically mentioned regarding Chinese politeness, we intend to draw attention to seemingly […]
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How did Polynesians and other Pacific Islanders interact verbally with Europeans during early colonial times? In turn, how did Cook and those who followed in his footsteps talk with Islanders on their explorations of the eastern Pacific? Answers to these questions emerge from my book Language Contact in the Colonial Pacific (2014) for an interdisciplinary […]
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