lexicity

 Through the incomparable Languagehat , I discover that there is a new website, Lexicity , with resources for learning a wide range of ancie...

possible worlds

In learning languages, at first everything is repulsive and burdensome. If one were not encouraged by the hope that, after having accustom...

will have had gone

One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem in becoming you...

tomato tomato?

For most of the twentieth century, Arabs, Arab nationalists, and their Western devotees tended to substitute Arab for Middle Eastern histo...

Languagehat has a post which includes a quotation from the Autobiography of the Protopope Avvakum. "Protopope" in Cyrillic: прото...

"Tadzhik is Persian-Farsi transliterated with Russian letters," Safar replied. "But nothing good ever came of it. They took a...

I'm barely fifty pages into Terry Martin's The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 an...

And then, between 1929 and 1932, he was sent on a number of journeys through central and southern Russia. Other writers who visited collecti...

Languagehat has a terrific account of Martha Ackmann's Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone: The First Woman to Play Professio...

At the beck and call of my consciousness are two or three little words: i vot ['and here'], uzhé ['already'], vdrug [...

observation

But in a person there lives a small observer – he takes part in neither actions nor sufferings – he is always cold-blooded and always the sa...

less unprintable than previously supposed

Languagehat has buried a terrific offer in the Comments section. As I mentioned in a previous post, the US publishers of Uglier than a Monk...

ineffable words

About a year ago Uglier Than a Monkey's Armpit, a book on untranslatable insults, put-downs and curses from around the world, was publi...

high life, low life

From Languagehat : [...] Concerning Vladimir Vladimirovich: people who have read his memoirs (I have not read them) write to me with amazeme...

let x = x

Andrew Gelman drew my attention to his latest post on different kinds of suspense. Wrote a looooooooong comment which turned out to have mi...

over there

I was trying to think of a way to explain Puppet Stayman to Evan Lavender-Smith, and not really succeeding, which is not to say I did not se...

new game new game new game

Language Hat quotes Remy de Gourmont in a post on The Writer's Capital Crime : Conformism, imitativeness, submission to rules and to tea...

this YouTube life

One way the reader can tell Humbert Humbert is not Vladimir Nabokov: 'At one point he confuses a hummingbird and a hawksmoth[?], now I w...