Category Archives: Linguistics

Thoughts on linguistics and languages.

On Language, Dialects and the Unreliability of Leaning Into a Pronunciation

My bike race of 2024 was a departure from years past: I tried a new event, the Engadin Radmarathon. The hosting town is Zernez, which is a 45-minute drive from Saint Moritz, in south-east Switzerland. Zernez’s canton – the rough equivalent of a Canadian province or UK county – is known as Graubünden in German, and Grisons, in French.

Zernez in Winter

But I don’t want to write about biking here. I want to write about language.

Languages and Dialects

Anyone who has visited Switzerland knows that many (most?) of the people are linguistic virtuosos.

There are four official languages in Switzerland. The percentage of Swiss who speak them as a first language are as follows: German (62.3%), French (22.8%), Italian (8.0%) and Romansh (0.5%).

In the case of Romansh, you have to give kudos to a country that officially supports a language spoken by such a small percentage of its people. [All four official languages appear on Swiss banknotes, which the Wangs crew will remember was a source of great mirth. “Dieci Franchi”, however, is Italian, not Romansh.]

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Negatives Without Positives

The title of this piece sounds quite a bit more depressing than it actually is. 

I am not talking about situations with no upside, but simply words that are in common use and carry a negative prefix (“negatives”), but where their base – the word without the prefix, or the word with what is normally the opposite prefix (“positives”) – has fallen into disuse. As we shall see, the principle can be applied to suffices as well.

To borrow a term from zoology, the type species for Negatives Without Positives (NWPs) might be uncouth: you certainly can be uncouth, but you can’t be couth.

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Run That By Me Again…

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The word “run” is particularly rich in the number of different (not to mention subtle and colourful) meanings it conveys.

Let’s start with the simplest senses of verb and noun: if you are in a hurry, you run. And if you are fitness-inclined, you go for a run.

But these basic meanings soon give way to more sophisticated nuance.

A Word Cloud for the text of the post <i>Run That By Me Again</i>

A Word Cloud for the text of the post Run That By Me Again

You can run a business. You can run a series of tests — or perform a series of tests; run and perform are equivalent here. But curiously, although you can perform a play, you do not run a play.

You can run the numbers. Or be given the run of the place.

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