linguistlaura

One of the most important things to the storylines of the long-running TV series Star Trek is that there's a universal translator. For t...

The 'normal' way of making a conditional in English is with an 'if'-clause: If you hurry up , we'll be in time f...

My student, Helen Pettersson, recently completed her MA dissertation on null subjects in English and Swedish text messages. She constructed ...

This is the first in a short series of posts about things I've noticed in my current book, The Leopard by Jo Nesbo. I'm reading the ...

This tweet appeared in my timeline today: KILLER WHALES aren’t whales. SLOWWORMS aren’t worms. HORNY TOADS aren’t toads. BEARCATS aren’t ...

A friend posted this photo on facebook the other day: A number of highly intelligent people then missed the point of the joke and began ...

German is famous for its compounds. I'm not sure this is fair, really, because as far as I can tell it just doesn't write the spaces...

It's no surprise when a newspaper publishes an article about language and fails to ask a linguist. They rarely do. It's even less of...

I happened to be on a site where someone had asked what the difference is between Parmesan and Parmigiano-Reggiano (which are the same thing...

The odious Neville Gwynne is at it again, publishing books. This time, he's written a Latin book. He's so pompous, my immediate inst...

Someone on a blog I read the other day posted this question, asking for advice: Does anyone know any tricks to know when English -ed is p...

I read this utterly depressing article about the legal problems of rape cases in India. (Note that I'm not passing judgement on any pa...

I couldn't sleep a few nights ago and watched a truly horrific programme called 'The Call Centre'. It's a 'structured re...

You know, Richard Dawkins is a clever chap, I think he writes well and I've enjoyed many of his books. But sometimes he says such stupid...

There's a game for various iDevices called The Simpsons: Tapped Out, in which you have to rebuild Springfield. It's good; I'm o...

A good example of the variation permitted between singular and plural for semantically plural but grammatically singular entities like bands...

On Thursday, Jeremy Paxman asked this question in the Christmas university challenge: 'according to the carol, what came upon a midnight...

Twitter has a search bar thing and in it, it says "enter a @name or username". Now, I've been pronouncing @name as "at na...

Well this is weird. Apparently, if you think in a foreign language when you're making a decision, you're more likely to make a rati...

Sorry for the proliferation of sign-related posts this week, but I keep seeing them. There's this sign in the lavs in the building wher...