How to use an etymological dictionary
Etymological resources provide information on the history of words. This blog post is a guide on how to use such resources.
Kategorie: Linguistics
What are ‘Papuan’ languages?
In this blog post, I’m discussing the most common misconceptions about the term ‘Papuan languages’ and the history of the term.
What are Conlangs Good For?
This blog post is a reply to a twitter thread titled “Here are 3 reasons why I hate conlangs”. I show where the author of the thread is wrong in my opinion and explore what conlangs are good for.
#LinguisticSunday: Adelung’s 1774 dictionary of the ‘High German dialect’
This post was orginally published in the series #LinguisticSunday in July 2020 on twitter and in September 2023 on mastodon and bluesky. Johann Christoph Adelung’s dictionary “Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der Hochdeutschen Mundart” (‘Grammatical-critical dictionary of...
What is the difference between dialects & languages?
Every academic field is confronted with terminology that is used and understood without problems by outsiders but which are extremely difficult to define within that field. One example is languages and dialects. These words...
How many people speak a North Halmahera language? (and why we don’t know exactly)
After I published my last blog post, I was asked how so many languages, belonging to two language families, fit on the rather small island of Halmahera. I will answer this question in this post. A warning: The answer is more complex than one may think.
What am I actually doing (with my life)?
For about one and a half years I have been working on my PhD project about the history of the North Halmahera languages. In this blog post, I want to describe briefly what I am actually doing.